The psychotherapist who draws support from rabbinic thought

Rabbi Salanter’s approach rested on a keen interest in psychology. “Freud taught the world the power of the unconscious,” Rabbi Sampson says. “Rabbi Israel Salanter preceded him by talking about the importance of understanding our unconscious motivations. And if we understand what is at the root of our difficulties, how do we overcome that?”

Rabbi Sampson calls his three-stage system “the ACTive method”, based on Rabbi Salanter’s concepts: Awareness  (hergesh in Hebrew), Control (kevishah) and Transformation (tikkun). First a person needs to find out what triggers their anger, say: then, to adopt ways to counter it: and, through that, ultimately turn themselves from an irascible person into a much calmer one.

To help a person modify their behaviour, he says, “there are three distinct ways which can be used, the power of thought, speech and action — the three garments of the soul”, as Lubavitch thought characterised them. “You can use each one of them, depending on what the client needs.”

The different professional techniques he draws on may have their parallel in Jewish sources. One of the main problems in a struggling marriage is “a breakdown in communication,” he says. “People are arguing and not listening. In psychotherapy, there is an approach called imago therapy which teaches people to mirror each other. You teach them a tool so, before they say what they have to say, they repeat what the other person says, to make sure they have got it.”

There is an example of a similar technique in the Talmud. “There are many arguments between the students of Hillel and Shammai. And the Talmud tells us why the students of Hillel generally win. They listened to the other person’s argument and they repeated it before they gave their own argument.”

Now 52, he was not always so ready with rabbinic references. From a middle-of-the-road United Synagogue family in Barnet, north London, he found little interest in religion after barmitzvah until his gap year in Israel, when he took some classes run by Aish. After a psychology degree at Leeds University, he gained his rabbinic diploma with Aish and worked for the Orthodox outreach organisation for a number of years before leaving to pursue what he felt was his “natural calling”.

The book’s title is a translation of the Hebrew Lech Lecha, God’s command to Abraham to leave his native land and embark on a journey of self-discovery.

Happiness lies in finding our true self, the source, as he puts it in the book, of our “inner sanity”, which leads us to seek what is “truly in our best interest”. By contrast, we are often waylaid by the “deceptive self”, which tries to rationalise misguided actions — the sita achra, “the other side”, as Kabbalists call it.

His Jewish learning may inform his therapeutic approach but generally he does not launch into stories about rabbis when dealing with clients. “I had someone sitting here, he was a very bright guy, not Jewish, who was very upset there was so much injustice. I remembered King Solomon said, ‘The more knowledge, the more pain’. So I may happen to say, ‘When you are more clever, you are see more what is going wrong.’”

Whereas Freud saw science as superseding religion, Rabbi Sampson argues “psychotherapy has moved on. Now it is not anti-religious and even has a positive view of spiritual development. It has changed.”

Like Judaism, psychotherapy offers hope of repair and tools to help a person grow. “I am passionate about psychotherapy because I think it works,” he says. “I have seen in my own work dramatic changes in marriages and in individuals. I think most of my colleagues will say the same.”

Look To Yourself is published by Mosaica at £20. For more details, see www.aryehsampson.com