Well, i pulled a book at random off the shelf to take with me to my training session--i knew i was going to get there very early, and wanted something to read while i waited. Turns out i found something i thought was interesting.

The book is "The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud" by Bruce Mazlish, © 1966. The copy i have pre-dates the ISBN number; it gives the Library of Congress Catalog Card number as 66-12559

Now, the section i'm going to quote comes from pages 401-405, and it is a bit long. The section is dealing with Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" along with some parts of "Totem and Taboo".



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If "Totem" appears fantastic, "Moses and Monotheism" has seemed to most scholars even more so.The Moses book, however, is a natural development of the Totem hypothesis, continuing the story of man's cultural evolution from the totemic organization of society to the emergence of the monotheistic religions. Like Totem, it seeks to establish an "unexpected unity" and to do so by psychoanalytic hypotheses. A brilliant, exaggerated tour de force, filled with illuminations, it illustrates the speculative impulse, which Freud as a young man had "ruthlessly to check," springing too abruptly and detatched from the empirical data. Yet, it is a serious and important book, to be read with deep interest.

The work is rooted in Freud's lifelong involvement with the legendary Moses. As Ernest Jones remarks, "There is every reason to suppose that the grand figure of Moses himself, from Freud's early biblical studies to the last book he ever wrote, was one of tremendous significance to him. Did he represent the formidable Father-Image or did Freud identify with him? Apparently both, at different periods." Thus, in 1912, the same year he was writing "Totem and Taboo", he began to compose an essay on the meaning of Michelangelo's Moses statue in Rome. Based on extended contemplation of the statue, for Freud had sat before it for hours, the essay "The Moses of Michelangelo" was finished in 1914. I shall single out only one point about this work. It is Freud's acute ability to observe details, such as that the tables in the statue were held upside down, and then to use these details in the construction of a psychoanalytic interpretation. Basing himself on this observation, Freud opposes the general view that the statue represented Moses as about to rise and chastise his disobedient followers dancing around the Golden Calf. Instead, he interprets the statue as showing Moses, suddenly aware that the sacred tables are about to fall to the ground, restraining himself with a mighty effort.

The same attention to the small detail and then the construction upon it of a psychological analysis is manifested in "Moses and Monotheism". Written over various periods, finished under the shadow of the Nazis in 1939, broken and uneven in style, the book is nevertheless a true example of Freud's method. It starts with sharp attention to a small detail, Moses' name, and proceeds from that along its "fantastic" path.

The opening thesis of the book is that Moses was an Egyptian, not a Jew. Freud reaches this conclusion on two grounds: (1) a philological investigation of the name, Moses; and (2) an analysis of Moses' birth and exposure in terms of other "birth of the hero" myths. Freud next postulates that Moses was a follower of Amenhotep IV, the Egyptioan Pharaoh (c. 1375 B.C.) who changed his name to Ikhnaton and set up the worship of the one God, Aton. With the counterrevolution against Ikhnaton's monotheism by the presits of the old-style worshi[, Moses, according to Freud's account, seized on an unusual destiny. Rejected by his own people in Egypt, Moses "chose" the Jews (henceforth the "chosen" people of God), a barbarous uncultured people, and, leading them out of bondage, shaped a "holy nation" out of them. Freud adds that Moses also introduced the Jews to the custom of circumcision, otherwise practiced only by the Egyptians.

At this point, Freud pauses to hear the reproach "that I have built up this edifice of conjectures with too great a certainty, for which no adequate grounds are to be found in the material itself." Reminding the reader that he has already himself stressed the hypothetical, the heuristic, character of his investigation, Freud plunges on to his second major thesis. Basing himself on a "discovery" of the biblical scolar, Ernst Sellin, Freud surmises that the Jews, chafing under the Mosaic laws, murdered Moses, the father figure. This re-enactment of the primal horde experience was as traumatic as the first experience. Forgotten and repressed through a long latency period, the material was psychologically "remembered" by Moses' followers, the Levites, even after their merging with other Jewish tribes, the Midianites. Without following Freud's involved account of the relations of the two segments of the
Jewish race, we come to the conclusion that, with the Israelite prophets, the original Mosaic religion was restored.

The unraveling of this history, Freud tells us, has been made difficult because the texts have been transformed and distorted. "The distortion of a text," however, he points out, "is not unlike a murder." It leaves traces, and these we can decipher with the magnifying glass of psychoanalysis. Since the latter tells us with certainty that "religious phenomina are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of long-forgotten important happenings in the primeval history of the human family," we know exavtly what to look for in mankind's history. The murder of Moses, recapitulating the primal crime, is the "long-forgotten important happening" which has generated the obsessional neurosis that has taken form as the Jewish religion. Totemism has been supplanted by monotheism.

It is not only the Jewish religion, however, which Freud's inquiry seeks to comprehend. It is the Christian as well. According to Freud, it is against the background of a growing and widespread feeling of guilt among the Jews and the inhabitants of the Mediterranean world that Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, must be understood. Paul correctly traced the feeling of guilt back to the primal murder, which he labelled "original sin." A crime against God the Father, it could only be expiated through death. A son of God, Christ, made the necessary sacrifice, and took upon Himself the collective guilt.

The matter, however, according to Freud, is even more complicated than this. Freud says of Christianity, "Meant to propiate the Father Deity, it ends by his being dethroned and set aside. the Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christ became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in his stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do." Thus, though Freud does not say this overtly, the Christians managed the double feat of assuaging their guilt and yet retaining their desire to replace the Father. One evidence of this is Holy Communion, in which the believer incorpreates the flesh and blood of the Redeemer, repeating thus the act of the old totem feast. The Christians also gave up the act of circumcision; and although Freud once again does not say this directly, he may well have been thinking that circumcision, as the symbolic act of castration, no longer held terrors for them.

The final comparison Freud makes between the two religions is unexpected. "In certain respects," he tells us, "the new religion was a cultural regression.... the Christians religion did not keep to the lofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewish religion had soared. The former was no longer strictly monotheistic; it took over from the surrounding peoples numerous symbolival rites, re-established the great mother goddess, and found room for many deities of polytheism." Then, with a momentous "And yet," Freud continues, "Christianity marked a progress in the history of religion: that is to say, in regard to the return of the repressed. From now on the Jewish religion was, so to speask, a fossil." Shades of Toynbee!

As with Totem, only more so, the Moses thesis is hard either to prove or to disprove. The events which it claims to explain are buried under the swirl of time, and there is little clear documentary evidence surviving. Some of Freud's subsidiary theories, such as the inheritance of acquired mental traits (a form of Lamarckian psychoanalysis, which we have not yet discussed), raises additional difficulties. Many of the "facts" are suspect: Moses' name may have been Egyptian, but the Jews, then as now, have frequently taken their names from the dominant culture in which they lived; the murder of Moses is dubious, and various of Freud's philological identifications are simply incorrect. We can only conclude, therefore, that Freud's application of psychoanalytic insights to the traditional accounts of the origins of the Jewish and Chrisitan religions results merely in a tenuous connection with what is, to begin with, unsatisfactory empirical data. the Moses book is indeed a very speculative work in the philosophy of history. What remains from Freud's work here is a chain of great "ifs," and a number of ingenious suggestions.

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Corv