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Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has been involved in the editing of Freud's work for many years; her knowledge of his oeuvre is very considerable and she herself contributes assiduously to increasing our own familiarity with it. In this biographical essay, derived from a lecture on Freud delivered at the University of Frankfurt, she has formulated and richly amplified an idea which may at first appear strange to the reader, but which he suddenly finds himself beginning to accept: the idea that the study of Moses can be read as a kind of daydream which arose in traumatic conditions of extreme hardship.
The author describes how this study of Freud's aroused her particular interest and held her attention in thrall, so that she ultimately came to apply Freud's own method to this work in an attempt at psychoanalytic interpretation.
In the course of her extensive study of Freud's surviving manuscripts, she had happened upon Freud's handwritten notes for his book Moses and Monotheism (1939). She had always been interested in that 'first draft' which had already been mentioned by the publishers of the Gesammelte Werke in 1941, which bore the unusual subtitle of The Man Moses, a Historical Novel.
The author's first concern was to determine in what respects the early version differed from that subsequently published by Freud. In the early years of his career, Freud had set no store by the preservation of his manuscripts, but had instead simply thrown them away as soon as the finished printed version was in his hands; this continued to be his practice until 1914. But even then, as Grubrich-Simitis reports, only clean manuscripts free of corrections usually survived—immaculate fair copies of the subsequent printed versions. To her considerable astonishment, the author discovered that the various Moses manuscripts were quite unlike this model, but contrasted with it in their imbalance and unevenness. She graphically compares them to a fissured quarry in the midst of the classical land