How does Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological theory connect with Jewish sources? How can the hidden language of images and dreams allow a person to explore the vast landscape of the soul? What drives someone to leave the comfort of the familiar and embark on an inner journey filled with challenges and pain?
Before training as a Jungian analyst, Efrat Hermoni spent years as a violinist — a background that continues to shape her attentiveness to what she calls the underlying melody of the soul. In Longing for Rain, she brings this sensibility to a sustained dialogue between Jungian psychology and a range of Jewish sacred texts, reading passages from the Bible, Midrashic literature, and the Zohar as what she terms collective dreams — expressions of shared psychic life accessible through the symbolic language that Jung placed at the centre of depth psychology.
The book’s seven chapters move through specific textual and thematic territories: the Flood narrative, the Tower of Babel, the phenomenon of dreaming, the Prophet Jonah, the Garden of Eden, and tales drawn from the Zohar and the animal realm. Running through these readings are three core concerns — the psychology of hubris, the dynamics of separation and exile, and the transformative potential of the inward journey. Clinical material is woven throughout, alongside the theoretical contributions of Erich Neumann. Illustrated by Israeli artist Anat Gopher, the volume holds an unusual combination of scholarly, clinical, and poetic registers. Hermoni trained at the Israel Institute for Jungian Psychology in Jerusalem and holds an MA in expressive and creative therapy from Lesley University, Boston.
A translated work of Israeli Jungian thought, this volume extends the conversation between analytical psychology and Jewish textual tradition in a distinctive and clinically grounded voice.