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.
The “sexual libido” took over the role of a deus absconditus, a hidden or concealed god… Yahweh and sexuality-remained the same. The name alone had changed and with it, of course, the point of view: the lost god had now to be sought below, not above. (Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
Most interpreters of Freud's Moses and Monotheism dismiss it as one of his least interesting analytic works.1 It is the product of his old age, written while his health was deteriorating, and during the rise of Nazi Germany, a time when the tenuousness of the psychoanalytic movement in Vienna and the vulnerability of Jews to anti-Semitism were much on his mind.2 Because the substantive claims of Moses and Monotheism have been dismissed, attention has recently focused instead on what this work signifies about Freud's own Jewishness (Robert 1976; Krüll 1986; Yerushalmi 1991; Geller 1993a, 1993b). The fact that Freud initially intended to call Moses and Monotheism a historical novel signifies, according to some, that he did not regard this as a serious historical work on the Jewish religion.
While many of the historical claims in Moses and Monotheism are absurd, Freud did formulate a number of illuminating analytic questions about the relationship between the deity's gender and corresponding religious practices, particularly in the third essay of the book. This is the essay that Freud could not bring himself to publish in Vienna during the rise of Nazi Germany, and only published subsequently after fleeing to England. And it is this essay that Freud himself recognizes as containing the essential parts of his arguments.3 Indeed, the