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Psychoanalysis has survived the anthropologists' dismissal of Freud's Primal Horde Myth and, with some apologies, has backed off from the application to groups of ‘facts’ learned from the psychoanalysis of patients. However, the broad application of the clinical psychoanalytic method to the larger cultural arena was as much a part of Freud's original work as was his pursuit of understanding of the mind and man's inner conflict. Now Robert Paul serves as Freud's advocate to represent his position on anthropology almost a hundred years later.
Dr Paul, a cultural anthropologist who has been educated as a psychoanalyst as well, has written an exciting reinterpretation of the Primal Horde Myth and has used the myth to help us understand the Bible and various religious practices. I was initially a sceptical reader, but became so fascinated with Paul's thesis that I not only read on but longed for the next chapter to see where Paul would take me in his reinterpretation of the Pentateuch and, ultimately, the New Testament and the ritual of the Eucharist.
Paul carefully states his aim as follows: ‘to show how the concept of unconscious guilt can be put to the service of an understanding of how the compelling authority of the law arises’ (p. 72). From this central thesis, Paul revives our interest in Freud's Primal Horde as a generative myth that he uses to interpret the tale of the Exodus as a transitional watershed marking the shift from a pre-moral primal state of man into civilisation and the establishment of the moral order.
Paul notes: ‘I regard Freud's myth of the Primal Horde as being an analysis, if perhaps unwitting, of the central narrative around which the Judeo-Christian tradition is organized’ (p. 17). Using various techniques of ‘decomposition’ and applying the mechanisms of dream work, Paul shows that the central elements of male-female and senior male-junior male, become the formulaic background of the Mosaic narrative. He then carefully uses the Midrash ‘