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A text that never ceases to amaze us with its endless ability to raise questions, in a way Moses and Monotheism is Freud's spiritual testament. And this text, with the question ≪regarding the foundation of the inalterable identity of the Jewish people≫ (Bertani and Ranchetti, XIII), in other words, a courageous and painful excavation from the inside, rather than the outside of one's own identity as well as the identity of the group, indicates a line of resistance to protect the meaning and spirit of psychoanalysis.
With Moses and Monotheism, Freud has shown us the originality and validity of psychoanalytical thinking, by showing us ≪a revival of the ancient fight for interiority, to bring exteriority into interiority, a characteristic that appears in Jewish thinking and that in Ruin the Sacred Truth (1989) allows Harold Bloom to discover in Jeremiah 20, ‘there is in my heart as it were a burning fire / shut up in my bones’, the same inspiration that runs through Freud's conceptualization≫ (Egidi Morpurgo, 1993, 427).
As is generally known, the Freudian discourse on society and civilization (Kultur)1 began with Totem and Taboo (1912-13). The subject was then developed in some of his later great works: Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, 1921), The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927), Civilization and its Discontent (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1929), ending with none other than Moses and Monotheism (DerMann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, 1934-38). However, the interest in the conscious and unconscious psychological foundations of society runs through all Freud's works since it is closely linked with the formulation of the libido, theory and the Oedipal conflict.