RELIGIOUS PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE PHILOSEMITIC ANTI-SEMITISM OF BRAZILIAN EVANGELICALS (2015-2021)

Faculdade Gospel was founded thirty years ago in Ituitaba, a city in the interior of Brazil. The institution offers ‘bachelors’, ‘master’ and ‘doctoral’ courses, not recognized by the Ministry of Education in Brazil, on a wide range of topics, among them, Gospel Psychoanalysis. On the cover of every book of this Evangelical school for pastors placed a flag of Israel and Brazil, as a sign of alliance and the phrase “A nation of passionate worshipers for Jesus”. In the courses contents, the boundary between modern State Israel and biblical Israel is blurred and there are questions about Freud`s Jewishness, whose identity is seen as atheistic.

Gospel Psychoanalytical studies is a new subject in the field of Jewish Studies in Brazil; and offer a new perspective for studies of attitudes to Israel by Brazilian political forces linked to Pentecostalism. The goal of this presentation is to reflect on the praise of Jews and Israel by the Faculdade Gospel, as a form of philosemitism. The training materials in Gospel Psychoanalysis support the traditional anti-Semitic tropes, such as the stereotypes about a "cunning Jew" or a "rich Jew", here however , these stereotypes are subject to praise and study by the students. In general, the objective of the research is to understand how psychoanalysis was appropriated by this theological discourse or, in other words, how the evangelization of psychoanalysis took place as a metaphor for a knowledge of “lay” and modern Jewish tradition from an evangelical perspective.