You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a well-written scholarly book presenting a detailed study of the personality and character traits of Moses. The Old Testament's Pentateuch is our only direct source of knowledge about Moses, and most of it is said to have been written by Moses. Because Moses tells his own story, his psycho-dynamics can be reconstructed by an empathetic psychoanalytically trained clinician such as Dorothy Zeligs. She places Moses in the role of a biblical analysand and formulates his psychodynamics using standard psychoanalytic theory and technique. Her aim is “to explore not only the surface meaning but also the stream of unconscious fantasy that motivated and colored the production of the biblical story” (p. 19).
Within this psychological framework, Zeligs does a first-rate job of building a psychological profile of Moses. However, I do not completely accept her psychological framework for studying Moses. First of all, it seems most unlikely that Moses wrote his own story in the Old Testament. It is much more likely that it is a distillation of the writing of several authors who lived after Moses.
This is an outstanding psychological study if we accept Zeligs' two basic assumptions—that Moses was the author and therefore that the biblical text can be interpreted as one would the free associations of an analysand. It remains a very fine book containing a bold attempt at psychoanalytic biography even if we don't accept these two basic assumptions. In not accepting them, I am reminded of how cautious Freud was when he first wrote Moses and Monotheism. He was aware that his psychological speculations were not grounded on solid historical fact and he initially referred to his book on Moses and Monotheism as an historical novel. Later, Freud did locate a couple of key historical documents which buttressed his argument that Moses was an Egyptian.
I would have preferred Zeligs to have emphasized the speculative nature of her psychological formulations. She might have made clear to the