Freud's Wizard

I recently received, unbidden, a catalog from Daedalus Books.  A couple of the books they are selling (both described on p. 23, in their "Self & Society" section) look at the origins of psychoanalysis.  One is called A DREAM OF UNDYING FAME.

Here's the ad copy for that one:  "In 1877, a young Sigmund Freud met an established physician named Josef Breuer and they began a collaboration that would lead to the publication of the classic work Studies on Hysteria.  Freud subsequently minimized Breuer's contributions, betraying his former mentor and benefactor.  Psychologist Louis Breger reveals the story behind the creation of Studies as well as the case of Anna O., which helped contribute to Freud's definition of 'neurosis,' showing how Freud's own self-mythologizing and history not only affected everything he did in life, but also helped shape his emerging beliefs about psychoanalysis."

The second of these books is called FREUD's WIZARD.  Here is the ad copy.

"The saturation of the English-speaking world with psychoanalytical concepts was instigated by one British analyst, Ernest Jones.  As Freud's disciple, collague, and biographer -- and the man who literally rescued Freud and his cabal from the Nazis in 1938 -- Jones led the international psychoanalytic movement, shifting its vortex from Vienna to London and spreading its influence to Toronto, New York, and Boston.  Brenda Maddox's biography reveals a brilliant and flawed analyst who both venerated and challenged his mentor, and who well understood and used his own abilities to attract women in a string of liaisons."

Both books, as you can see, focus on the mentor-protege relationship, and together they give us Freud at each side of it.

Bernstein on Freud on Moses

Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998).

"We may feel uneasy about the way in which Freud so freely appeals to the Hebrew Bible when it suits his purposes, and dismisses it as a distortion when it contradicts his beliefs.  Freud does open himself to serious methodological critique when he self-confidently asserts: 'No historian can regard the biublical account of Moses and the Exodus as anything other that a pious piece of imaginative fiction, which has recast a remote tradition for the benefit of its own tendentious purposes'....It is difficult to resist the conclusion that once Freud became convinced about what he thought really happened, he then scanned the Bible in order to select the evidence that would support his case."

That would seem spot on.  Bernstein doesn't think Freud makes a contribution to our understanding of Moses or ancient Egypt, although he does think that studying this particular book can make a contribution to our understanding both of Freud and of his circle.

Both the friends and the enemies of psychoanalysis called it a "Jewish science."  Anna Freud herself said in 1977 that such characterizations, even though or in part because they were once hurled by Nazis, "can serve as a title of honour."    

The questions that intrigue Bernstein concern the issue of what Jewish identity meant in the time of Alfred Dreyfus, at least for the highly educated and secular European Jews of whom Freud was an example, and whether psychoanalysis, in a sense that need be neither a disparagement nor a title of honor, was in origin Jewish.

Yerushalmi on Freud on Moses

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, a former professor of Jewish History at Columbia, in NYC, passed away in 2009.  Back in 1993, though,  he wrote FREUD'S MOSES, a discussion of Sigmund Freud's theory on the buried (historically and psychoanalytically buried) origins of monotheism. 

In one brief passage in that book, he states Freud's theory in a more straightforward manner than Freud ever managed to.  I'll reproduce that here. 

"Monotheism is not of Jewish origin but an Egyptian discovery.  The pharaoh Amenhotep IV established it as his state religion in the form of an exclusive worship of the sun-power, or Aton, thereafter calling himself Ikhnaton.  The Aton religion ... was characterized by the exclusive belief in one God, the rejection of anthropomorphism, magic, and sorcery, and the absolute denial of an afterlife.  Upon Ikhnaton's death, however, his great heresy was rapidly undone, and the Egyptians reverted to their old gods.  Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian priest or noble, and a fervent monotheist.  In order to save the Aton religion from extinction he placed himself at the head of an oppressed Semitic tribe living in Egypt, brought them forth from bondage, and created a new nation.  He gave them an even more spiritualized, imageless form of monotheistic religion and, in order to set them apart, introduced the Egyptian custom of circumcision.  But the crude mass of former slaves could not bear the severe demands of the new faith.  In a mob revolt, Moses was killed and the memory of the murder repressed.  The Israelites went on to form an alliance of compromise with kindred Semitic tribes in Midian whose fierce volcanic deity, named Yahweh, now became their national God.  As a result, the God of Moses was fused with Yahweh and the deeds of Moses ascribed to a Midianite priest also called Moses.  However, over a period of centuries the submerged tradition of the true faith and its founder gathered  sufficient force to reassert itself and emerge victorious.  Yahweh was henceforth endowed with the universal and spiritual qualities of Moses' god, though the memory of Moses' murder remained repressed, reemerging only in a very disguised form with the rise of Christianity."

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