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In the 1935 “Postscript” to his “Autobiographical Study” , written while he was in the midst of composing “Moses and Monotheism”, Freud makes this remarkable assertion: “My interest, after making a lifelong detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking” (72). As for what those cultural problems were, he makes that clear in the opening pages of his “Autobiographical Study” itself: “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest” (8). Put those two things together and you get “Moses and Monotheism”. In that text (hereafter “Moses”), Freud applies the ontological developmental pattern of “trauma-repression-latency-return of the repressed”, derived during his “lifelong detour in psychotherapy” from his understanding of obsessional neurosis, to the analogous emergence of monotheistic religion at the group level. The original trauma in this case is the murder of Moses at the hands of his rebellious followers. Monotheism arose with compulsive force after a period of repression and latency as the defensive effect of the revived memory of the crime among those followers, who were to become the Jews.
In the book under review, nine authors, as well as the editor, address a range of different aspects of Freud’s often perplexing text from a diverse array of scholarly perspectives. (Due to the length of Freud’s text, the work itself is not included in this most recent entry into the book series “Contemporary Freud, Turning Points and Contemporary Issues”, as has been the case in past contributions to the series.) Not only does Freud’s “Moses” invite a scholarly investigation of an almost limitless variety of connections, it has also spawned a very
considerable literature of commentary and critique which also cr