Archaic Heritage, the Self-Contradiction in Monotheism, and the Jewish Ethos of Menschlichkeit: Thoughts of a Psychoanalyst on a Triple Centenary

The centenary of the foundation of the psychoanalytic journal Imago is a suitable occasion to reflect on topics of psychoanalysis and religion. Its Latin name, imago, has a very broad spectrum of meanings. Besides the easily understandable one of its English derivative—image—it refers also to the wax masks of the deceased carried in ancient Rome during funeral processions and for the images of the ancestors; it also may refer to a dream image, a ghost, a shadow, a metaphor, an imagination. The word is related to the verb imitari, to imitate. And of course it has much to do with the image of a god or of “God.” And that is the main content of the following study: a psychoanalytic inquiry into the inner contradictions in the imago of God, specifically the God of monotheism.

The centenary of the journal and the subject of this essay immediately coincide with a parallel centenary: that of the appearance of Freud’s first book length study on the origins and psychology of religions, Totem and Taboo. This important and yet nowadays rather neglected work was first published as four essays to inaugurate Imago in 1912–1913. In the following, I will repeatedly refer to this extremely bold synthesis of widely disparate phenomena. Its almost fantastic reconstruction of mankind’s and man’s outer and inner history brings together two enormously important phenomena of religious prehistory and anthropology: the existence of widespread taboo systems and the formation of totemic proto-religions. The latter refers to the reverence felt by a cohesive communal group for an animal or plant that is adored or shunned with awe but also killed and eaten in special festivals. The ambivalence of reverential and murderous feelings is connected in totemism with exogamy, the rigid taboo against sex within the clan. Freud builds awe-inspiring bridges linking totemism and taboo to the treatment of neurosis and child psychology and ends up with a solid bridgehead on the other side: the cardinal explanatory role of the Oedipus complex at the core of religion, ethics, and society. As Yigal Blumenberg recently observed (2012), strangely absent from this beautiful construct is the role of Judaism, a vacancy later filled by Freud in his Moses monograph (1939 [1934–38]), the first two sections of which were published in Imago during its final year in Vienna, 1937.

Finally, we encounter a seemingly unrelated centenary: the jubilee of the great humanitarian women’s Jewish-Zionist organization Hadassah. It was founded one hundred years ago on Purim 1912 and allegedly therefore took the Aramaic by-name of the Biblical heroine Esther—Hadassah—a name interpreted in the Bible as myrtle. This origin and meaning is quite controversial. One connection is to the Babylonian hadashatu—bride—a leading attribute of Ishtar, the great Babylonian goddess of love, sexuality, and fertility but also of war and cruelty, the northwest Semitic (Biblical) Astarte. The name Esther is usually derived from Ishtar and her uncle’s name Mordecai from Marduk, the patron god of Babylon. In other words: Esther Hadassah could be translated as Ishtar the Bride.¹ With the name Hadassah we find ourselves—at least etymologically—uneasily in the illustrious but louche company of polytheistic mythology. The resolute attempt to suppress this deeper layer of meaning in favor of the exclusive form of monotheism is one of the Purim narrative’s main messages—and the main subject of the following study.

Exclusive Monotheism

The introduction of monotheism in human history is by rights intimately related to the Bible and to Judaism. Still, we have to qualify this: the religion of ancient Egypt showed in its later development a strong tendency to merge all the gods into the one God, Amun, the Hidden One, even before the great Pharaoh Achnaton established for his brief reign a rigorous monotheistic system focused on Aton, the sun god (around 1350 BCE). A thousand years later something very similar happened in Greek and Roman antiquity: religion became imbued with the...