Digging the Well Deep: The Jewish “Ultra-Orthodox” Relationship with the Divine Explored through the Lifeworld of the Breslov Chasidic Community in Safed

The Jewish Charedi (“ultra-orthodox”) community is an example of a contemporary social group whose lifeworld is dictated almost entirely by the tenets of its religious beliefs. This thesis seeks to illuminate the physical, psychological, social and metaphysical structures of that Charedi world, using the Breslov Chasidic community in the town of Safed, northern Israel, as its ethnographic anchor. Following an introductory theoretical background to Judaism, Kabbalah, the Chasidic movement, and the Breslov group, a descriptive account is given of the Breslov lifeworld across many of its facets, including demographics, dress, prayer and study practices, the venerated position of the head Rabbi of the community, various religious practices, connection to and meditation in nature, attitudes towards non-Jews, pilgrimage, and the use of psychoactive drugs. This ethnographic material forms the basis for subsequent deeper analyses. The Charedi aspiration towards “zero degrees of freedom”, in terms of that society’s extreme application of the myriad prescriptions and proscriptions of Halakhic Law, is discussed, as well as Charedi society’s emphasis on constituting its own identity through what it is not; namely the “goyim” (non-Jews) and non-religious Jews. The parallels between Judaism and the anthropological category of shamanism are considered, with the argument made that much of the Jewish tradition is essentially shamanic, yet that this aspect of the religion has been relegated to a relatively minor position in the contemporary Jewish religious (including Charedi) milieu. A functional analysis is then given regarding certain Jewish practices, demonstrating that Judaism contains within it sophisticated mechanisms, acting in affective, cognitive and social domains, to ensure replication of the religion—and specifically its core “template”, the Torah—from generation to generation. This analysis is followed by an exploration of the phenomenology of the religious experience and the Torah lifeworld, seeking to penetrate and document the experience of “being Breslov”. The final chapter ties all of the previous material together, presenting several psychoanalytic perspectives on the Charedi phenomenon

Diminished neural processing of aversive and rewarding stimuli during selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment

Background: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are popular medications for anxiety and depression, but their effectiveness, particularly in patients with prominent symptoms of loss of motivation and pleasure, has been questioned. There are few studies of the effect of SSRIs on neural reward mechanisms in humans. Methods: We studied 45 healthy participants who were randomly allocated to receive SSRI citalopram, the noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor reboxetine, or placebo for 7 days in a double-blind, parallel group design. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the neural response to rewarding (sight and/or flavor of chocolate) and aversive stimuli (sight of moldy strawberries and/or an unpleasant strawberry taste) on the final day of drug treatment. Results: Citalopram reduced activation to the chocolate stimuli in the ventral striatum and the ventral medial/orbitofrontal cortex. In contrast, reboxetine did not suppress ventral striatal activity and in fact increased neural responses within medial orbitofrontal cortex to reward. Citalopram also decreased neural responses to the aversive stimuli conditions in key "punishment" areas such as the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. Reboxetine produced a similar, although weaker effect. Conclusions: Our findings are the first to show that treatment with SSRIs can diminish the neural processing of both rewarding and aversive stimuli. The ability of SSRIs to decrease neural responses to reward might underlie the questioned efficacy of SSRIs in depressive conditions characterized by decreased motivation and anhedonia and could also account for the experience of emotional blunting described by some patients during SSRI treatment

Antidepressant medications reduce subcortical–cortical resting-state functional connectivity in healthy volunteers

Studies have revealed abnormalities in resting-state functional connectivity in those with major depressive disorder specifically in areas such as the dorsal anterior cingulate, thalamus, amygdala, the pallidostriatum and subgenual cingulate. However, the effect of antidepressant medications on human brain function is less clear and the effect of these drugs on resting-state functional connectivity is unknown