Moses and Monotheism

The founder of psychoanalysis was a nonobservant, nonbelieving Jew whose closest social and professional colleagues in Vienna were other like-minded Jews. Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia (now Příbor, Czech Republic), and received his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1881. In 1885, after further medical training in Paris, he opened a practice in Vienna, specializing in nervous disorders and focusing on childhood experiences and dream analysis. Freud recognized that an analysis of patients’ dreams could reveal a complex of unconscious and subconscious acts of repression, which, he proposed, underlay the formation of diverse symptoms. In the decades that followed, Freud elaborated this axial notion—that our actions are to a considerable degree dictated by a complex of desires of which we are largely unconscious—into a clinical method and an entire theory of human mind and development that he called “psychoanalysis.” From the 1920s, horrified by the mass slaughter of World War I, Freud increasingly turned his attention to trying to make sense of social phenomena with the tools of psychoanalysis; his 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents argued that civilization itself is only possible insofar as we redirect primal urges toward constructive behavior, but warned that the stresses of this positive repression meant that group forms of social pathology, religious irrationalism, and violence remained a permanent possibility beneath the surface of liberal society. With the rise of Nazism a terrifying case in point, Freud was able to escape Austria in 1938 and settled in London. Although Freud took no part in the institutional life of the Jewish community, he always took pride in his attachment to the Jewish people. Moses and Monotheism, his last and most controversial work, was his only sustained foray into the problematics of Jewish identity, but it built on long-standing interests both in Judaism and in the sources of anti-Jewish enmity.