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Freud's paper is re-examined and placed in biographical and historical context, Moses and monotheism (1934–1938) is treated as a parallel text. Freud's ironic scepticism is viewed against the background of Thomas Mann's 1936 idealization of psychoanalysis. Freud was a sick and dying man in 1937 with every reason for personal pessimism. The political setting was the triumph of fascism in Austria and the impending seizure of Austria by Hitler. Freud fantasized the protection of psychoanalysis by the Roman Catholic Church. The paper is a polemic against the theories of Ferenczi, Adler, and Rank. Contemporaneous defence of prophylactic analysis
by Fenichel is reviewed. Freud's political judgement of the moral equivalence of Social Democracy and fascism is critiqued. Freud's injunction to periodic re-analysis and his vision of analysis as 'unending' is supported. The possibility of intergenerational prophylaxis is presented.