An Economy of Delight: Sha’ashu’im, Jouissance, and the Erotics of Healing

Julian Y Ungar-Sargon

Abstract

This paper argues that at the core of the doctor–patient relationship lies a structure of delight — not pleasure in the ordinary clinical sense of relieved symptoms or satisfied metrics, but the far older theological category the Hebrew tradition names sha ‘ashu’im (????????????). Beginning from Proverbs 8:30 — “I was His delight day after day” — the tradition gradually transformed a word for play and cherished affection into one of the deepest names for creation itself, a name for the way the Infinite seeks relationship with the finite through the dialectic of concealment and revelation.

I trace the genealogy of sha’ashu’im across the Tanakh, midrash, Talmud, the Bahir and Zohar, Lurianic Kabbalah, Chabad and Breslov Hasidism, and the cosmic creativity of Rav Kook, drawing especially on Elliot R. Wolfson’s reading of divine delight as the experience of unity discovering itself through difference. I then place this cosmic symbol in critical dialogue with its apparent secular twin and shadow: the Lacanian concept of jouissance, the painful surplus enjoyment that emerges when the subject transgresses the pleasure principle. Where sha’ashu’im names a delight that completes through relation, jouissance names an enjoyment that consumes through the foreclosure of relation. The clinic, I argue, is the precise site where these two economies of enjoyment contend.

Building on my published essays on the therapeutic tzimtzum, the “space between” healer and patient, revelation-in-concealment, the patient as sacred text, and sacred listening [1-4], I advance a thesis: the therapeutic encounter, when it succeeds, is a re-enactment of cosmic sha’ashu’im. The physician who contracts the self to make room for the patient, who does not abolish concealment but creates a space in which revelation may emerge from within it, participates in the same structure by which, in much of Kabbalah and Hasidut, the world exists at all. The deepest satisfaction of medicine is not the removal of distance but the discovery of intimacy through distance. Medicine’s characteristic pathologies — burnout, the commodified “self-serving loop,” defensive practice, the reduction of the patient to a data object — are correspondingly read as the clinic’s drift from sha’ashu’im into jouissance.