Woody Allen, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Taboos

by Jonas E. Alexis

Woody Allen is an interesting filmmaker. Not only has he had a continuing fascination with psychoanalysis, but he has also had, as the Jewish Rabbi Samuel Dresner notes,

“a ‘persistent fascination’ with incest…He has been in psychoanalysis for over 30 years; his fascination, whether expressed in his writing, or through his seduction of his and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter is best explained by an analysis of Freud. Freud, too, was obsessed with incest…

“David Bakan…claims Freud was a follower of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi whose attack on Moses was an attempt to abolish the law as Zevi did, through ritual impurity.

“Jews who promote sexual revolution are in this tradition: ‘They,’ Dresner says, ‘conjure up painful memories of the infamous seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Tzvi or his successor, Jacob Frank.”[1]

Remember what we learned from Sabbatai Tzvi and his followers in the middle of the eighteenth century. They

“engaged in secret antinomian rites: they practiced necromancy, masturbated and then smeared the whole body with the semen, permitted or even encouraged incest, practiced wife swapping and group sex, advocated a complete sexual freedom, and ‘permitted perjury, theft, and adultery.”[2]

Freud’s psychic determinism largely sanitized the Sabbatean cult, and Woody Allen largely sanitized Freud’s sexual theories through his movies—though his audience hardly sees the connections.

But the issue goes even deeper. As Jewish sexologist Ruth Westheimer herself put it, “Judaism is intensely sexual,” and “sex, in and of itself, has never been a sin for Jews, or something not to discuss.”[3]

It is no surprise, then, that Allen would use subtle sexual liberation as a cornerstone in many of his movies. Allen makes it clear that

“Almost all my work is autobiographical and yet so exaggerated and distorted it reads to me like fiction.”[4]

Even the word Christmas, at one point, was offensive to Allen. His longtime lover, actress Mia Farrow, star of the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby, recounted that he

“‘disliked Christmas;’ he disrupted the family Christmas meal by running a juicer at deafening decibel levels to drown out conversation. When Farrow mentioned how beautiful the Christmas carols were at a concert, Allen responded, ‘Pardon me while I puke.’”[5]

Having devoted his entire life to the doctrines of Freudian psychoanalysis, Allen’s life, by definition, has been molded to fit the philosophy. Farrow declared that

“it had helped to isolate him from people and from the systems we live by, and placed him at the center of a different reality—one that exists only after he has bounced his views off his therapist.

“Woody lived and made his decisions while suspended in a zone constructed and controlled almost entirely by himself—a world that he used his therapists to validate.

“He did not acknowledge other beings except as features in his own landscape, valued according to their contribution to his own existence. He was therefore unable to empathize and felt no moral responsibility to anyone or anything.”[6]

This is the philosophy that drives Allen’s movies and his lifestyle.

“While waiting for Woody to finish a therapy session in January 1992, Farrow received a call from him that took her to the mantel in his apartment where he had placed pornographic photographs of Soon-Yi, Farrow’s adopted daughter. Confronted by Farrow, Allen admitted to an affair with Soon-Yi.

“The conversation vacillated over the range of emotions from Allen saying he was in love with Soon-Yi and wanted to marry her, to admissions of guilt, to claiming it was no big deal.

“‘I think it was good for Soon-Yi,’ Allen said, ‘It gave her confidence.’ Allen claimed, ‘I told Soon-Yi she shouldn’t expect anything. I encouraged her to go ahead and sleep with other guys’…

“[Allen] had learned from his analyst to say yes to himself every time his id said I want. The most famous line to emerge from the Farrow/Allen brawl popped up in the Time magazine interview.

“When asked if he considered his relationship with Soon-Yi a healthy, equal one, Allen answered, ‘Who knows?… The heart wants what it wants’…

“After pondering the issue for a while, Farrow concluded,

“‘Deep inside Woody there was an unfathomable and uncontrollable need to destroy everything good and positive in his life, and so he tried to destroy our family.

“For [Allen] to have sex with one of my children, a child he had known as my daughter since she was eight years old, was not enough: he had to make me see, graphically, what he was doing.

What rage did he feel against me, against women, against mothers, against sisters, against daughters, against an entire family? The pictures were a grenade he threw into our home, and no one was unharmed.’”[7]

After ending a fourteen-year relationship with Farrow, Allen married Soon-Yi in 1997 and has since adopted two children with her.

Yet Woody Allen is far from the only person who has lived his or her life along sexually revolutionary lines. One individual who uses pornography as a form of sexual control in Hollywood is the Jewish porn star, porn director, and sex educator Nina Hartley, who is an open bisexual. Hartley declares,

“I’m proud of my heritage’s intellectual history and its empathy with the persecuted. But I’m not a Zionist.

“Politically, I’m left-wing. I want everyone to have a job, everyone to have food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education. Utopia might be communist but in the meantime, we have to have socialism. I want everyone to have a piece.”[8]

Sure. But this “piece” Hartley is talking about is not freedom from tyranny and oppression like Marxism and Communism and Psychoanalysis, which were first set into motion by Jewish revolutionaries, but

“a piece of sex, a piece of the means of production, a piece of a warm communist community, and a piece of the promised Messianic Age—now.”[9]

Hartley is an intelligent woman who graduated from San Francisco State University nursing school magna cum laude in 1985. Yet she chose to use the over 500 pornographic movies she has been in to get her message across.

“Porn taught me how to say what I wanted. I like the casual nature of the sex in pornography because it allowed me to be actively bisexual and curious about the body.”[10]

Hartley goes on to tell a group of students during a speech at the University of California, Berkley,

“It doesn’t have to be love to have healthy respectful sex. This is the time to experiment and try new things.”[11]

As we have seen in previous articles, this rebellion against the moral/political/sexual order got started in the first century, when the Jewish people categorically and metaphysically rejected Logos incarnate and substituted something repulsive and sinister.

In theological terms, this came to be known as “the synagogue of Satan,” the spiritual and diabolical cell from which all significant subversive activity springs—from the first century to the twenty-first.

Furthermore, that synagogue seeks to destroy every moral order and is largely responsible for anti-Jewish reactions in the world.

Jewish psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who has been christened one of the most influential intellectuals in the history of psychiatry, would probably and indirectly agree with this assessment.

Author of such books as The Sexual Revolution, and The Function of Orgasm: Discovery of the Orgone, Reich “was a student of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx who tried to marry those quintessentially revolutionary Jewish ideologies. Reich wrote the book on sexual revolution that many Jewish porn stars read.”[12]

Myron Sharaf, Reich’s biographer, noted,

“Reich was well aware that he was a ‘fury on earth’ and of the fate meted out for such furies. Indeed, this very problem preoccupied him during the last years of his life.”[13]

Sharaf also notes that “Reich was impressed with the failure of not only Marxism but of other revolutionary ideas such as Christianity.”[14]

Accordingly, Reich stirred up sexual revolution wherever he could, moving from one country to another.

“As a Communist in Germany, Reich was expelled from the party for his writings on sexual permissiveness and ‘counterrevolutionary’ thinking…

“In Denmark, the attack on him by orthodox psychiatrists in 1933 hastened his departure for Sweden, but the hostility he encountered there led him in 1934 to Norway.

“In 1939, after two years of adverse publicity in the Norwegian press, he left for the United States, where he resumed his psychiatric practice in New York, trained other psychiatrists, and lectured at the New School for Social Research.”[15]

Reich had to flee Germany right after the rise of Hitler in 1933 because he was promoting sexual revolution among the youth, particularly with his book The Sexual Struggle of Youth.[16]

Taking refuge in America, it was not long, however, before Reich’s “research” was found to be fraudulent in the United States as well, and he was later investigated by the Food and Drug Administration and sent to prison.

After eight months, “he suffered a fatal heart attack” and died in 1957.[17]

Reich’s ideas not only opened the floodgates for porn stars and promoters to propagate pornography as a form of sexual “freedom,” particularly among Jewish actors and producers, but they also laid the foundation for “quiet-middle class married people” to become

“involved in this quest for free expression and more control over their own bodies…Churchgoing women disobeyed their religion in preventing the birth of unwanted children through abortion or various forms of birth control.”[18]

Around the same time, a number of Jewish psychologists began to seize the moment to advance their sexual theories. Albert Ellis began to propagate the idea that “healthy adultery” could spice up marriages.

Abraham Maslow—who would later team up with Alfred Kinsey,[19] a part-time disciple of Aleister Crowley,[20] the nineteenth-century famous occultist who got involved in sex magic[21]—argued that

“group nudity could also be personally beneficial [and] that nudist camps or parks might be places where people can emerge from hiding behind their clothes and armor, and become self-accepting, revealing, and honest.”[22]

And within a few years, novelist Phillip Roth would contribute to the sexual revolution through fiction, peppering his writing with psychology by saying things like,

“Put the id back in the yid! Liberate this nice Jewish boy’s libido, will you please? Raise the prices if you have too! I’ll pay anything!”[23]

Reich’s books, particularly The Sexual Revolution, “found a receptive audience among college students and activists who, through him, understood more clearly the connection between sex and politics.”[24]

Both Freud and Reich, along with Alfred Kinsey, contributed enormously to the sexual revolution which got out of control in the 1960s. Yet this did not happen overnight. In the 1920s and 1930s,

“Jews were prominent in the distribution of gallantiana, avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials.”[25]

Nathan Abrams

Reich’s mission was carried on by one of his patients, Frederick S. Perls, who became the most prominent therapist at the Esalen Institute in Northern California. Perls declared, “We have to lose our minds and come to our senses.”[26]

Indeed. Many lost their minds and embraced the sexual revolution, turning their backs on morals. One of the reasons is that we have been bombarded by Jewish apologists who keep telling us that pornography is not only freedom but harmless.

For example, for many years, Alan Dershowitz defended pornography as a harmless enterprise.[27] When the pornographic movie Deep Throat came out in 1972, Dershowitz was on the front lines in defending Jewish actor Harry Reems for his role in the movie.

From 1977 to 1988, Dershowitz was a staunch defender of pornography, titling one of his essays “Justice: Connecting Pornography with Violence is Junk Science, Which Doesn’t Belong in Courts.”[28]

This particular essay was published by Penthouse, a pornographic magazine, for which Dershowitz wrote about seventy-five articles, the majority of which were published during the latter half of the 1980s.

But Dershowitz could hardly be the only one. Jewish scholar Joshua Lambert recently wrote in his recent book Unclean Lips,

“In the decade leading up to Rosset’s republication of Tropic of Cancer, and in the decade that followed it, many of the defendants in crucial, precedent-setting Supreme Court obscenity cases were Jewish men, especially in Burstyn v. Wilson (1952), Roth v. United States (1957), Freedman v. Maryland (1965), Mishkin v. New York (1966), Ginzburg v. the United States (1966), Ginsberg v. New York (1968), Cohen v. California (1971), and Miller v. California (1973).

“As conventional and mail-order publishers, editors, film distributors, newsdealers, and social protesters, the men named in these cases tested the limits of the American law of obscenity and the First Amendment….

“As the Chicago trial of Miller’s novel illustrates, American Jews played crucial roles in obscenity controversies not just as defendants but also as lawyers, judges, and witnesses. Jewish lawyers were often willing to defend people accused of obscenity even when their liberal non-Jewish colleagues were not.”[29]

Lambert continues, “In the postwar decades, many of the most influential lawyers who took on obscenity cases were also Jewish…Some Jewish judges also exerted substantial influence on the development of the law of obscenity.”[30]

Lambert makes the case, quite understandably, that not all Jews are involved in this nefarious activity and cites decent people like Judith Reisman, whose book The Case Against Kinsey has been quite informative. But Lambert defeats much of his insights by saying that

“American Jews often engaged with obscenity—produced it, defended it, wrote about it—for precisely the same reasons that many of their Protestant, Catholic, and nonreligious peers did so: to make money, to seek sexual gratification, to express antisocial rage.”[31]

Lambert has the scholarly sophistication to examine the theological/Talmudic implication of what it means to be “Jewish,” but it seems that the political landscape does not allow him to go to the root of the problem.

For example, Lambert, like Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams before him, seems to dismiss serious evidence because Lambert sees that anti-Semites are quick to draw serious conclusions from the evidence.

We would agree with Lambert on the fact that not all Jews are involved in subversive activity. In fact, the distinction has been made long ago, going as far back as the first century. In the twentieth century, right before the rise of Nazi Germany, Augustine Cardinal Hlong made this point:

“It is a fact that Jews have a corruptive influence on morals and that their publishing houses are spreading pornography. It is true that Jews are perpetrating fraud, practicing usury, and dealing in prostitution…

“But let us be fair. Not all Jews are this way. There are many Jews who are believers, honest, just, kind, and philanthropic. There is a healthy, edifying sense of family in very many Jewish homes. We know Jews who are ethically outstanding, noble, and upright.”[32]

People indeed can be good, bad, and indifferent, but the metaphysical ideology which logically flows from Rabbinic Judaism, and which eventually took over the lives of the Jewish people, is intensely hostile to the moral order. Here we are not fighting against decent people. We are fighting against a wicked ideology that has serious implications.

Lambert moves on to make this stunning claim:

“Cultural and legal historians and literary scholars who have studied literary obscenity in the United States and England have tended to avoid the question of the relationship of Jewishness to their subject.

“Not wanting to reproduce the nativist anti-Semitism of Comstock and other anti-vice crusaders or to provide support for the racist claims about Jewish sexuality trumpeted by avowed anti-Semites, serious scholars of American law and culture tend not to dwell on the Jewishness of so many of the figures who played key roles in the history of obscenity and pornography in the United States, even while these same scholars do attend scrupulously to the religious and ethnic affiliations of Protestants and Catholics…

“As Hollinger notes, most often the way that Americanist scholars ‘avoid both bosterism and bigotry’ around the question of Jews’ influence in a particular industry or area of cultural endeavor is simply ‘to avoid talking about Jews.’

“The unintended consequence of such understandable reticence has been the neglect by scholars of American culture of some of the key dynamics through which concerns about ethnicity, religion, and sexuality intertwined in the literary and cultural history of the United States.”[33]

People do not want to study this issue because they are scared to death to be called anti-Semites. Moreover, people like Lambert do not want to come out and declare unambiguously that the key players behind pornography are largely the dreadful few. Why?

Well, because anti-Semites might use those studies as weapons. Remember what happened to Abrams when he came out and said the code word in 2004? Here’s Abrams:

“A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer that the ‘triple ethics didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America.

“Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ‘true blue’ Jews.

“Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two percent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography.”

Abrams added that the obvious reason why Jews are in that particular business is that pornography is

“a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged…

“Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America…

“Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.

“Astyr remembers having ‘to run or fight for it in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could very well be that part of my porn career is an ‘up yours’ to these people’…

“Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading.”[34]

Yet in 2008, Abrams refuted the very statement he had stated in his 2004 article. Abrams had good reasons to back off, for he saw that “many anti-Semites are eager” to display the negative side of Jewish pornography.[35]

No matter what those in the business say, the truth is that pornography is a weapon that strikes at the very heart of the moral order. And it is one that has been deliberately and skillfully wielded by those determined to bring the moral order down.

But the pornography business is not going to be shut down anytime soon because it has a $ 97 billion revenue every year![36] As the book of James declares, the love of money is the root of all evil.

CITATIONS

[1] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 997.

[2] Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 249.

[3] Quoted in Joshua Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 11.

[4] Eric Lax, Conversations with Woody Allen (New York: Knopf, 2007), 7.

[5] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 1008.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 1008-9.

[8] Ibid., 1031.

[9] Ibid., 1034.

[10] Sarah Mourra, “Porn Star Talks Sex to Students,” Daily Californian, Nov. 22, 2000.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 1031.

[13] Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 13.

[14] Ibid., 321.

[15] Jeffrey Escoffier and Fred W. McDarrah, Sexual Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 192-193.

[16] Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York Da Capo Press, 1994), 150-168.

[17] Escoffier and McDarrah, Sexual Revolution, 193.

[18] Ibid., 194.

[19] See for example Joyce Milton, The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents (New York: Encounter Books, 2002).

[20] Judith A. Reisman, Kinsey—Crimes and Consequences: The Red Queen and the Grand Scheme (Crestwood: Institute of Media Education, 1998).

[21] Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

[22] Escoffier and McDarrah, Sexual Revolution., 195.

[23] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 981.

[24] Escoffier and McDarrah, Sexual Revolution, 194.

[25] Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124.

[26] Ibid., 196.

[27] Charles McGrath, “An X-Rated Phenomenon Revisited,” NY Times, Feb. 9, 2005.

[28] Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, vol. III (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 978.

[29] Lambert, Unclean Lips, 7.

[30] Ibid., 8.

[31] Ibid., 14.

[32] Quoted in Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 22.

[33] Lambert, Unclean Lips, 10, 12.

[34] Nathan Abrams, “Triple Exthnics,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004.

[35] Nathan Abrams, ed., Jews and Sex (London: Five Leaves Publications, 2008), 177-178.

[36] Donald L. Hilton and Clark Watts, “Pornography Addiction: A Neuroscience Perspective,” Surgical Neurological International, February 21, 2011.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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