You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
During the last thirty-six years, since the publication of Totem and Taboo, psychoanalytic research has sufficiently established the fact that the myths of the various peoples are but endless variations of relatively few unconscious ideas; this warrants going a step further and looking for specific trends in the different mythologies, which is attempted here with regard to the Jews and the Hellenes.
This paper forms part of a greater context; it is the introductory chapter of a book, now in preparation, in which a psychoanalytic search into the “Jewish personality” is attempted. The theory is set forth that the Jew, as a psychologic type, is determined by a specific pattern of resolving the Oedipus complex, and that other national types are similarly characterized by specific patterns of repression. This is first demonstrated by contrasting the Jewish and Hellenic trends in the “shadowgraph” of mythology and ritual, where we can see the unconscious trends as if they were projected upon a screen. At the same time, it is stressed that the value of mythology as a source for such studies is limited.
The Jewish attitude found its monumental expression in the concept of Jewish monotheism. Here the emotional submission to the father assumes cosmic dimensions. The father's image is projected into the skies and becomes so awe-inspiring that His countenance dare no longer be visualized (“Thou shalt not make a graven image”), nor dare His name be pronounced (so that it fell into oblivion and scientific research had to rediscover it as reading