Political Theology

ISSN: 1462-317X (Print) 1743-1719 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypot20

Freud and monotheism: Moses and the violent

origins of religion

Wolfgang Müller-Funk

To cite this article: Wolfgang Müller-Funk (2018): Freud and monotheism: Moses and the violent
origins of religion, Political Theology, DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2018.1505381

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2018.1505381

Published online: 18 Oct 2018.

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POLITICAL THEOLOGY

BOOK REVIEW

Freud and monotheism: Moses and the violent origins of religion, edited by Gilad
Sharvit and Karen S. Feldman, New York, Fordham University Press, 2018, 248 pp.,
$95.00, ISBN: 978-0-82328002-5 Berkeley Forum in the Humanities

The reception history of Sigmund Freud’s last book, for many interpreters his “testament,” is
astonishing. On the one hand, it is, as Yael Segalovitz, one of the contributors, points out,
associated with predicates such as “painful, repetitive, peculiar, serpentine, contradictory, frus-
trating, odd” (108). On the other hand, as prominent books by prestigious scholars such as Jan
Assmann and Richard J. Bernstein have made evident, Freud’s book on Moses plays a central
role not only with regard to what one could call the psychoanalytic discourse but also with
regard to the discussion of monotheism in particular and of religion in general.1
As Ronald Hendel argues, “for a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, Freud’s Moses and Monothe-
ism is an oddity.” By 1940, William F. Albright had already dismissed Freud’s study as “totally
devoid of serious historical methods,” while another scholar wrote in an Exodus commentary
that Freud “was confecting fantastic pseudo-history” (157). Hendel, who not only rereads
Freud’s crucial text but also reads Edgar Sellin’s 1922 study, in which Freud found the
thesis that Moses was killed by his own people, comes to an interesting conclusion. Although
Freud’s thesis is not tenable, we continue reading his study because it is a document of what
Hendel calls a “Mosaic discourse” in a secular modern world (172).
This discourse is at the center of the new volume under discussion here. Containing articles
by Richard J. Bernstein, Joel Whitebook, and Jan Assmann, it proves at the same time to be its
frame. All of these prominent scholars have published books about the topic.2
In contrast to the critiques of Hendel or Yerushalmi,3 Assmann does not discuss the ques-
tion of the “truth” of Freud’s historical “case study,” rather tries to understand it as a foil for a
psychoanalytic approach to monotheistic religion. As Assmann, a specialist of ancient Egypt,
points out, the Jewish character is seen by Freud in a double and controversial way: as a “pro-
gress in intellectuality” (Geistigkeit) but with “a specific susceptibility to the neurotic father-
religion of monotheism” (142). It is embedded in a central Jewish myth, the “Exodus myth”
(152).
Assmann, who sees not only in Sellin but interestingly in Goethe as well a positive forerun-
ner of Freud’s detective story on Moses, tries to bring together the two character attributions
by arguing that the price for the intellectual progress which came into the world with Moses
(and Jesus) is a collective neurosis. Because of the exclusive claim to the truth of the one and
only God, it also entails a tyrannical gesture that includes “terrible punishment” for all those
who disregard His commandments. There is a suggestion in Assmann, as in Odo Marquard’s
philosophy, that polytheism fits better with the pluralistic (post)modern world than the abso-
luteness of monotheism.
Joel Whitebook’s argument, in contrast, goes in a completely different direction. The author
denies that Freud’s post-humanistic Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit is progress at all. He calls it a
problematic and misogynist concept, because it legitimates the suppression of sensuality and
emotionality. Moreover, it includes “a repudiation of femininity and maternity” (50). One may
1
Müller-Funk, Scholz-Strasser, and Westerink, Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality.
2
Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses; Assmann, Moses, the Egyptian; Assmann, The Price of Monotheism; and White-
book, Freud, 430–51.
3
Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses.
2 BOOK REVIEW

raise the question of whether Whitebook’s understanding of male and female, as a fixed and
binary opposition, is any longer convincing: it suggests that both categories are historically
predetermined and unchanging. The equation of male with intellectual and female with
sensual is more than problematic.
Richard J. Bernstein’s contribution also addresses the question of the extent to which the Jews
– Moses’ grudging people – can be seen, in Freud’s interpretation, as the representatives of a new
kind of intellectual spirit (Geistigkeit). The philosopher starts with a provocative question,
namely of “why the Jews have attracted this undying hatred” (27). From the very beginning,
he makes it clear that this text is a theoretical but in some respects also a political testament.
It is a hidden manifesto, because it works out a complex issue of the Jewish people, a creation
of Moses and his monotheism. Analogously, psychoanalysis is seen as “Jewish”, because its intel-
lectual attitude can be interpreted as a heritage of the Jewish Geistigkeit.
For Bernstein, Freud’s late text is a prime example of his understanding of ambivalence,
“wherein affirmation and negation are simultaneous and inseparable” (Laplanche/Pontalis,
quoted, 36). The progress of an intellectual religion that forbids making images of God pro-
vokes violence, violence against the prophet of the new monotheistic and abstract religion,
which at the same time suppresses all other forms and types of religions. It would be a chal-
lenge to pose the question of the extent to which psychoanalysis can be seen within Freud’s
concept of ambivalence.
The importance of Freud’s late writing also relates to the fact that it is an application of his
theory of collective neurosis, first worked out in Totem and Taboo. It proves to be a narrative pro-
gressing in the followings stages: early trauma, defence, latency, outbreak of neurotic illness,
partial return of the repressed. The murder of Moses, real or symbolic, is essential to Freuds
“novel” on Moses, because it constructs Jewishness by way of a dramatic detour. It was Lou
Andreas-Salomé who recognized that in this case, vital elements of Moses’ religion survived,
because his people affirmed the burden of monotheism in the end – after a long historical road.
Summarizing, one could say that the majority of (scientific) readers of Freud’s late manifesto
have developed a form of (close) reading of the text that is beyond the question of the historical
truth of Freud’s interpretation. They have accepted – and this holds true for other contributors
to this volume (Gabriele Schwab, Catherine Malabou, and Gilad Sharvit) – what Freud said from
the very beginning about his last book: that he had written a historical novel.

References
Assmann, J. Moses, the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997.
Assmann, J. The Price of Monotheism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
Bernstein, R. J. Freud and the Legacy of Moses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Müller-Funk, W., I. Scholz-Strasser, and H. Westerink. In Psychoanalysis, Monotheism and Morality. Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2013.
Whitebook, J. Freud: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Yerushalmi, Y. H. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991.

Wolfgang Müller-Funk
University of Vienna
wolfgang.mueller-funk@univie.ac.at
© 2018 Wolfgang Müller-Funk
https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2018.1505381