An Educational American Journal of Psychoanalysis Devoted to an Understanding of Human Conduct

In his advanced age Freud returned to the study of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) that attracted him in his early years,1 and he presented the world with his Moses and Monotheism, of which E. Jones justifiably says in his review of the book: “This memorable book is one of the most interesting Freud ever wrote.”2 I quote the passage from the “An Autobiographical Study”: “My early familiarity with the Bible story (at a time almost before I had learned the art of reading) has, as I recognized later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest.” This is a very great credit to the Bible, indeed. The words have a profound meaning. The biblical myths, as myths in general, are expressions of human urges and impulses, cravings and longings, that moved man in the infancy and childhood of the human race, that move every child in its most impressionable years when he recapitulates man's mental development from the animal to the civilized stage. Those urges and impulses man is wrestling with, and often overcome by them to the end of his life. In his mature manhood the great genius was to find a cure for the mental sicknesses caused by the conflict of those psychic forces and devise a method for the interpretation of the myths.

In the intervening seventy years, between the time when the Bible story was read to him and his Moses and Monotheism, Freud's field of activity lay outside the Hebrew Scriptures and its Religion, but the psychology he conceived has a tremendous bearing also upon all that goes by the name of Religion. In truth, the Freudian