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Religion remains one of the most powerful forces motivating human beings, and indeed entire societies and nations. Its influence is in many
ways transformed, but is still unbroken, despite advances in science and insight. Its study has fascinated scholars of many stripes, and psychoanalysis has continually tried to deal with its many manifestations and varied history; developments in religious studies have always evoked a profound interest among analysts. The last few years have opened up new insights into the development of Western religion. I will mention but two German contributions that could profoundly influence our understanding of Judaism and Christianity. One pertains to the introduction of monotheism in human history, a topic that moved Freud to write his last book, Moses and Monotheism, and is the subject of two important works by the Egyptologist Jan Assmann: the religion of ancient Egypt showed in its later development a strong tendency to merge all the gods into the one God Amun, the “Hidden One,” and thus to become monotheistic, even before the great Pharaoh Echnaton established during his brief reign a rigorous monotheistic system focused on Aton, the sun god (c. 1350 B.C.). A thousand years later something very similar happened in Greek and Roman antiquity: religion became imbued with a belief in “the One and All—to Hen kai Pan.” And yet, there was a dramatic difference between such an inclusive monotheism, which encompassed all the pagan divinities within its one God, and the Biblical deity: the latter's exclusivity.
Assmann (2003) starts out with the “psychohistorical aspect,” stressed above all by Freud: “The turn to monotheism with its ethical demands, its emphasis on the inner man and its character as ‘father religion’ is joined with a new mental attitude and new ‘nature of soul,’ that have decisively shaped the Western view of mankind” (p. 12). He adds: “I call the crucial point of this turn ‘The Mosaic Distinction.’ It is not the distinction