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“Two decades ago, on the shore of the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere between Egypt and Greece, [Velikovsky] read Freud's last book, Moses and Monotheism, and was prompted to read more about Akhnaton, the real hero of that book.” (p. 11) This, his latest book, continues his investigations in ancient history presented in Worlds in Collision , Ages in Chaos (1952), and Earth in Upheaval (1955), to all of which he has brought a kind of analytic technique comparable to that with which Reik has stripped myths for their core-meanings. The results should be classified as “Detective History,” which often proves far more fascinating than its fictional counterpart.
Psychoanalytic interest centers itself on the mythical tragic king of Thebes in Boeotia for the universal subconscious experience he represents, as set forth dramatically in the Cycles of Sophicles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. Valikovsky assumes only that no co-regency with his father preceded the reign of Amenhotep IV, who later named himself Aknaton, know through all Egyptian History as “the criminal of Akhet-Aton.” He then develops an identity of events in the mythic drama and the extant historic record: Oedipus, the classical victim of his own subconscious motivation, was undone by Atē (“judicial blindness sent by the goads”); Akhnaton, the Egyptian victim of seuf-conscious action, is made to seem, thus, to have been undone by Aton.
The legendary hero, or his historical prototype, marked by swollen lower extremities, spending his young years in exile away from his home in Thebes; his return, upon his father's death, to his homeland and kingdom, which for a short while had been ruled by the royal widow; his lack of reverencè for the memory of his father, whose name he erased and whose memorial tablet he mutilated; his living in wedlock with his mother with whom he begot children; his popularity among his subjects and their affection for the king ‘who lives in truth’ and was thought to be wise; the occurrence of som