Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other concepts have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his assumption of Western superiority over ‘primitive’ peoples, and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions over into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

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‘Moses and Monotheism’ was Freud’s last published work, written when he was wracked by painful cancer of the jaw, and anxiety about the Nazis who had taken over his native Austria in March 1938. This relatively short pamphlet (just 50 pages in the Pelican Freud Library edition) is characterised by much hesitancy, repetition and apologies, most unlike Freud and unlike the ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940)’ written at the same time, which is a masterpiece of confidence and brevity.

1. Moses an Egyptian (10 pages)

The Bible tells us Moses was born the son of poor Israelites in bondage in Egypt who abandoned him in a basket and let him drift down the river where he was found by a princess of the Egyptian royal family and adopted by Pharaoh. Freud says Moses was an Egyptian for two reasons:

1) his name takes the same form as the Egyptian suffix for child, ‘mosis’, frequently added to parental forms, thus Tuth-Mosis or Ra-Mosis (Rameses) mean child of Tut and Ra.

2) The second reason is longer. Otto Rank, Freud’s faithful amanuensis, in 1909 wrote ‘The Myth of The Birth of The Hero’ which shows a surprising similarity between ancient myths of heroes. Sargon, Cyrus, Oedipus, Paris, Romulus, Gilgamesh – according to Rank, a hero is someone who has the courage to stand up to his father. Almost always the hero is made the child of an aristocratic couple – then oracles or prohibitions lead the father to decide to abandon him – he is found and reared by a lowly family (or even animal, in Romulus’s case) – and returns in glory to take revenge on his father and become the leader of the people.

Rank/Freud psychoanalyse all these stories as fictional reworkings of every child’s prehistory. The child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his parents – they are the king and queen of fairy tale. Later, disappointed by their banality and weakness, the child figures himself the real son of an aristocratic family who have for some reason abandoned him to these two losers. This pattern of fantasy, repeated by all children, Freud names the Family Romance. Thus the two families of myth are one. (Freud doesn’t mention it but also this myth helps ratify the power of whichever strong leader arises to rule the tribe by linking him in a subterranean way with the established royal line.)

Fine. But the Moses myth actually stands out from this pattern because the process is reversed: his first family are lowly Israelites, his second family, from which he must rebel, royal. Freud says the other way of considering this myth is to realise that the first family (i.e. the long-lost aristocratic family which the angry child constructs for itself in the Family Romance) is always a figment. Why not apply this to the Moses myth? Thus, the lowly Israelite family is a figment added by later chroniclers, to explain the embarrassing fact that their national leader was in fact an Egyptian aristocrat.

2. If Moses Was An Egyptian… (40 pages)

According to Freud, Moses was a follower of the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaten. As a result of the military exploits of the great pharaoh Tuthmosis III, hero of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt ruled a vast empire stretching from Sudan in the south as far as Syria and Mesopotamia in the East. Around 1375 BC, towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the young Pharaoh Amenophis IV came to power. The Empire was dominated by a complicated theology involving hundreds of local gods – some of the most important of which were Ra, the sun god, Osiris, god of the afterlife, and Amon, god of life. Maybe no religion in history has been so obsessed with the afterlife and ensuring the safe passage of its leaders to Elysium (witness the Pyramids).

Amanhotep IV came to power and set about replacing the polytheism of his people with belief in one god, Aten. He changed his name to incorporate the new deity – Akhenaten. This is commonly held to be the first monotheistic religion in the world. But, as Freud dryly remarks, barely did you have monotheism before you had persecution. Akhenaten supervised the destruction of existing gods’ statues and struck the names of earlier gods off stelae.

The new emperor, obsessed with his religious reforms, ignored the state of the Empire which began to suffer from enemy incursions. The affronted priests, the frustrated generals and the common people angry at the loss of their traditional gods rose up and overthrew Akhenaten, whose end is obscure. He died in 1358 BC. Briefly his son-in-law ruled, a boy called Tutankhaten who was forced to change his name to remove the offending Aten-suffix and replace it with the name of the traditional god, Amun: Tutankhamen. The old gods returned and there was a time of civil war. Around 1350 BC the Eighteenth Dynasty ended. This much is historical fact. (cf Philip Glass’s opera, Akhenaten).

What we know of Akenhaten and his new religion is found at the ruins of the new capital he tried to establish around the new worship; after his fall this was sacked and plundered. But enough remains to give an indication of what his religion was like. Akhenaten’s was the first attempt at monotheism recorded anywhere in the world. It preached one sole god, creator of the universe. It proscribed magic and ritual; no visual imagery has been found of Aten. Lastly there is no mention of the dead, of an afterlife, of the all-powerful death god Osiris who dominates orthodox Egyptian worship. Suspiciously like what came to be called Judaism, eh?

In the Bible Moses is described as being a great Egyptian general before he discovers the truth about his Jewish lineage; surely it is clear, says Freud, that he was a great Egyptian general fighting for the new Pharoah, and that the chaos caused by the overthrow gave him the opportunity to take away a whole people and subject them to Akhenaten’s monotheism, now overthrown in the land of its birth. A clue is given by circumcision, a common Egyptian practice which Moses imposed on his new people.

But Moses’ beliefs never really caught on except among the narrow circle of his Egyptian soldiery. After years of tyrannical rule the Jews rose up and killed their leader, Moses (cf Freud’s fantasies about early human societies in ‘Totem and Taboo’, the Oedipus myth and the passion of Christ).

According to the historians Freud refers to, soon afterwards another part of the Jewish people, meeting at Kadesh near the Midianite kingdom, adopted belief in Yahweh, a volcano god from the Saudi peninsula.

(Freud observes the interesting correlation between Yahweh and Jove, ‘the thunderer’. A cult of the volcano god may have derived from the cataclysm which swept away ‘Atlantis’ i.e. the Minoan civilisation about 1300BC i.e. a generation or two after Akhenaten. Freud speculates that the cataclysm may also have swept away the prevailing matriarchies in favour of a powerful masculine thunder god.)

Some Jews, then, adopted the new religion of Yahweh; the others clung to the memory of their Egyptian exile and the great leader. At a further stage the two parts of the tribe became reunited. After negotiations it was decided to coalesce the two histories: the national liberator became a servant of Yahweh. This coalition explains discrepancies in the story, one Moses being violent and impatient (as you’d expect a great general to be) the other, the founder of the Yahweh cult, gentle and mild. Soon afterwards the Jews were ready to invade Canaan and set up a nation state.

The historical record is thus: The events of the Exodus c 1300 BC. Of the first four books of the Pentateuch the oldest part was written by J (since he refers to God as Yahweh or Jehovah) around 1000 BC; sometime later bits were added by E (so-called because he refers to God as Elohim). After the collapse of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC a Jewish priest combined J and E and added some of his own material. In the seventh century the fifth book, Deuteronomy, is added. In the period after the destruction of the Temple, 586 BC, the revision known as the Priestly Code was made. The Jewish character and religion was finalised by the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth century before Christ.

It is during this process that the teachings of Judaism are formulated, that Moses and his monotheism are given an honourable prequel in the lives of the Patriarchs, all of whom are given initial contacts with Yahweh and the special covenant devised. That retrospective fabrication parallels the prospective history as the Prophets call the people of Israel back to the pure monotheism of Moses and that tradition becomes more central.

(Freud then rehearses his earlier theory: the human family, i.e. early communities, underwent a similar history to individual families: early trauma, repression, latency, puberty and return of the repressed. Thus some early trauma occurred in prehistory and its resultant neurosis is religion – ‘Totem and Taboo’, the exiled brothers band together to overthrow the father of the horde, kill him, eat him. This is the origin of law and morality; law because they realise they can’t all have what the father possessed; morality because they create a ban on incest. The tribe sets up a totem animal as a representative of the father’s authority and a guarantor of the new morality. In the course of time the animal totem is humanised into a god, maybe with animal parts or accompanied by an animal. This involves into polytheism where the gods jostle under civil constraint (as the sons do). And eventually to the return of the repressed Father as a single god of unlimited dominion.)

The uniquely monotheistic tradition of the Jews accounts for their uniquely concentrated guilt. Their idea of being the Chosen of God gave them a unique sense of coherence and high calling. And the high spirituality and concern with morality associated with Jews is connected with their Advance In Intellectuallity:

• their prohibition of all graven images (so you can only think about God)
• the embodiment of religion in texts which have to be guarded and interpreted by sophisticated schools of rabbis
• their diaspora after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD which made preservation of the texts and their right interpretation essential

Finally, the repressed guilt returns in the figure of Paul of Tarsus, a Roman Jew who sets out a theology around the figure of an obscure Nazarene preacher. The Good News is that the (repressed) historic guilt is atoned for, says Paul, and we have entered a new era of Love. The Son has atoned for the primal guilt all of us sons feel, having inherited the guilt of the primal crime. Christianity was able to reintroduce many elements of the old Atum religion, and incorporated elements from its time – a mother goddess, lesser gods (the angels), a dark spirit (Satan) much magic and spells, an afterlife with a heaven and hell. It represents a step back intellectually from Judaism but – in analytical terms, in terms of dealing with guilt and the unconscious – it is a step forward.

Antisemitism

Is due to specific historic reasons: 1) the Jews’ outsiderness and 2) their surprising success at intellectual activities for their numbers. Also 3) a deep resentment among their ‘host’ populations, of their supposed arrogance, of their thinking they are the ‘Chosen’ people. And also due, Freud thinks, to 4) their not having consciously acknowledged responsibility for killing the Father. The Christians can say we killed our Father-returned-as-the-Son, we acknowledge it, we live in a new era, redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of all of us; but the Jews won’t face it. Paul reformed Judaism by re-enacting its repressed secret and in so doing made Judaism a fossil.

How does all this work?

Freud gives a resume of the topographical theory of the psyche: ego, id and the repressed. He then says analysis has shown that children appear to remember an archaic heritage, composed of memory traces of the childhood of the race ‘memory traces of the experiences of earlier generations!’ (volume 13, page 345)

If we assume the survival of these memory traces in the archaic heritage, we have bridged the gulf between individual and group psychology: we can deal with peoples as we do with an individual neurotic…Men have always known in this special way that they had a primal father and that they killed him.

The crucial premise is that these events are stored in the unconscious; because only unconscious forces are capable of generating the amount of irrational compulsion we see produced by religion. A rational response to clearly perceived events would lead to discussion etc. Only the unconscious can produce such forces. And after a period similar to the latency period in individuals, the Prophets mark a pubescent revival of the original fervour. Freud then goes on to explain the mechanism of pride associated with advances in intellectuality. Renouncing instinctive wishes is, in a sense, automatic for the ego. But it can bring definite affects from the superego. The superego of the Jews is the memory of Moses; with every renunciation of the life of the spirit, the Jews acquired more pride.

The superego is the successor and representative of the individual’s parents who supervised his actions in the first period of his life. It keeps the ego in a permanent state of dependence and exercises a constant pressure on it. Just as in childhood the ego is apprehensive about risking the love of its supreme master; it feels his approval as liberation and satisfaction and his reproaches as pangs of conscience. When the ego has brought the superego the sacrifice of an instinctual renunciation, it expects to be rewarded by receiving more love from it. The consciousness of deserving this love is felt as pride. (13:364)

So, according to Freud, the Jew’s pride is based on:

1. renunciation of primitive wishes by the adoption of monotheism and becoming the Chosen people
2. the evident growth in ethical and intellectual superiority this led to

Both achievements, alas, only generated more resentment of the Jews in the less psychologically advanced populations they found themselves living among, whether that was first century Romans, nineteenth century Russians or twentieth century Germans.

Thoughts

Freud was right to adopt a tentative and hesitant tone in this, his last published work, because pretty much every expert in ancient history, the history of the Jews or Egyptians, regards the book as a farrago of distortions, fantasy and wild speculations. I enjoyed the judgement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who described Freud’s theories about the origins of Judaism as ‘painfully absurd’.

Freud’s speculations about early history (Totem and Taboo, Moses), and to some extent his naive and obsessive attacks on religion, demonstrate what a fool a clever thinker can make of themselves when they stray well beyond their field of expertise, especially when they start dabbling in big cultural and historical speculations. Stick to what you know.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. ‘Moses and Monotheism’ was first translated into English by James Strachey in 1964 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. My quotes are from the version included in volume 13 of the Pelican Freud Library, published in the 1985.

Related links

• Moses and Monotheism online

Freud and religion reading list

• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
• Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907)
• Totem and Taboo (1913)
• On Transience (1915)
• A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis (1923)
• The Future of An Illusion (1927)
• Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)
• Group Psychology (1930)
• Question of a Weltanschauung (1933)
• Moses and Monotheism (1939)

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