Wagenknecht places Freud's essay, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” alongside his other work, Moses and Monotheism. He observes an inability in Freud to choose between two different cultural identifications, that of Jew or of Gentile, between two different countries, two versions of parent, and two different emphases in sexual theory: bisexualism or patriarchalism. Studying the dramatics of gesture in “The Moses of Michelangelo,” Wagenknecht notes that he whose wrath is directed at the makers of graven images is represented in Freud's essay as a graven image, in the effort to drive paranoid decomposition in the direction of oedipal idealization. Wagenknecht notes several stages: a first stage in which Freud's alter ego associates himself with the mob Moses is about to chastise, a second stage of conflict in which Moses remains quiescent and is no longer about to leap up, and a third phase in which the interpretation shifts to Moses' lap where his hand counteracts his violent impulse and is dallying with his beard.