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Moses and Monotheism

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Moses and Monotheism
Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, first edition, 1939
AuthorSigmund Freud
Original titleDer Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion
TranslatorKaterine Jones
LanguageGerman
SubjectMoses
PublisherKnopf
Publication date
1939
Published in English
1939
Media typePrint
Pages186

Moses and Monotheism (Template:Lang-de) is a 1939 book about monotheism by Sigmund Freud, published in English translation in 1939.

Summary

The book consists of three essays and is an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a means of generating hypotheses about historical events. Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Hebrew, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist. Freud contradicts the biblical story of Moses with his own retelling of events, claiming that Moses only led his close followers into freedom during an unstable period in Egyptian history after Akhenaten (ca. 1350 BCE) and that they subsequently killed Moses in rebellion and later combined with another monotheistic tribe in Midian based on a volcanic God, Jahweh. Freud explains that years after the murder of Moses, the rebels regretted their action, thus forming the concept of the Messiah as a hope for the return of Moses as the Saviour of the Israelites. Freud said that the guilt from the murder of Moses is inherited through the generations; this guilt then drives the Jews to religion to make them feel better.

Reception

Theologian Rowan Williams concluded that Freud's accounts of the origin of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism are "painfully absurd", and that Freud's explanations are not scientific but rather "imaginative frameworks".[1] Philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and psychologist Sonu Shamdasani write that in Moses and Monotheism Freud applied to history "the same method of interpretation that he used in the privacy of his office to 'reconstruct' his patients' forgotten and repressed memories."[2]

See also

Further reading

  • Assmann, Jan (1998). Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism Harvard University Press.
  • Certeau, Michel de (1988). The Fiction of History: The Writing of Moses and Monotheism. [1975.] The Writing of History, pp. 308–354. (Translated by Tom Conley.) Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-05574-9
  • Chaney, Edward (2006). 'Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Religion', Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, eds. M. Ascari and A. Corrado. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
  • Chaney, E, 'Freudian Egypt', The London Magazine (April/May 2006), pp. 62–69.
  • Chaney, E, 'Moses and Monotheism, by Sigmund Freud’, 'The Canon', THE (Times Higher Education), 3–9 June 2010, No. 1,950, p. 53.
  • Edmundson, Mark (2008). The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days Bloomsbury United States ISBN 978-1-59691-430-8
  • Ginsburg, Ruth; Pardes, Ilona (2006). New Perspectives on Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
  • Paul, Robert A. (1996). Moses and civilization: The meaning behind Freud’s myth. ISBN 0-300-06428-4
  • Rice, Emanuel (1990). Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. Albany, New York: State University of New York.
  • Rice, Emanuel (1999). Freud, Moses, and the Religions of Egyptian Antiquity: A Journey Through History Psychoanalytic Review, 1999 Apr; 86(2):223–243. PMID 10461667
  • Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1991). Freud's Moses. New Haven: Yale University Press.

References

  1. ^ Williams, Rowan (1983), "Freudian Psychology", in Alan Richardson; John Bowden (eds.), A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, London: SCM Press, p. 220, ISBN 0 334 02208 8
  2. ^ Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel; Shamdasani, Sonu (2012). The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 179–180. ISBN 978-0-521-72978-9.

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