Naomi Nir Papers

Background on Naomi Nir

Born in Manchester, England, in 1917, Naomi Nir was raised in a prominent Jewish family. Her father, Shmuel (Samuel) Tolkowsky (1886-1965), was born in Belgium and moved to Palestine in 1911. An agronomist who pioneered the citrus industry in Palestine, he eventually became Israel’s Minister to Switzerland. Naomi’s mother Hannah was the daughter of Yitzhak Leib Goldberg (1860-1935), a leading Zionist and philanthropist. Naomi Nir lived in Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem for her entire life. She was fluent in English, Hebrew, French, and German. Married in 1940 to folklorist and anthropologist Raphael Patai (1910-1996), Naomi had two daughters (Ofra) Jennifer Schneider (b. 1942) and Daphne Patai (b. 1943), who, as of 1950, lived in the United States with their father. Naomi Nir ended her marriage in 1948 and lived alone for the rest of her life.

Never at home in the everyday world, Naomi Nir at the end of 1948 sought out a Jungian analysis with Erich Neumann (1905-1960), a German psychoanalyst and student of C. G. Jung who had moved to Palestine in 1934. Although she terminated the analysis after less than a year, she maintained an intense correspondence and relationship with Neumann for several years thereafter. In 1953 she spent time in Küsnacht, Switzerland, at the C. G. Jung Institute which had been founded in 1948. There, at Erich Neumann’s recommendation, she had an analysis with Emma Jung (wife of Carl Jung), who tried, unsuccessfully, to draw her back into the everyday world. The years 1948 through 1955 form the heart of Naomi Nir’s exploration of her inner world.

Her journals, which she called “Notes” for the musical reference and other reasons, cover the crucial years of her life when she was most immersed in the effort to explore the deep inner workings of the self as she understood it, finding kinship in the writings of mystics such as St. John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Though drawn to the dream analysis, active imagination, and archetypes that are well-known to Jungians, she at the same time criticized what she viewed as the shortcomings of the Jungian worldview, in particular its neglect of the “feminine” and of the entire sphere of love. Once back in Jerusalem, she worked for a while reassembling pottery on some archeological digs, and then for some years she did play therapy with troubled children. Despite having no formal training in this field, her evident gifts led specialists to send children to her for treatment.

Naomi Nir was a perennial student, driven to use her prodigious intellect to reach into and then beyond her own personal experience in a life-long attempt to understand what she saw as the central force of love in a world overrun by trivia. But, as she put it in an understated summation: “There is the problem of how to live by these deeper awarenesses,” a problem she never resolved. Throughout her life she maintained a fierce if isolated commitment to a truth tenaciously revealed to her of what it is to be human: there is no deeper awareness without love.

She died in Jerusalem in 2004, at the age of 86.