In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Moses’ Heritage. Psychoanalysis between Anthropology, History and Enlightenment1 Wolfgang Müller-Funk Freud’s essay Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion is out on a limb, not only because it is a late work and not only because there is, as is often observed, a mirroring effect in the text that confronts us with Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, as the double and the counterpart of Moses, the founder of Jewish monotheism. Prolonging Freud’s story on Moses, Freud could be seen as the third Moses, the Moses after his second – symbolic – death. But Freud’s highly speculative text is also prominent, because it is a summary of his oeuvre that is a permanent travelling, a movement of seeking. It confirms Freud’s attempt to give his ideas a more anthropological base instead of a purely scientific and biological one (as is the case at least since Totem und Tabu). But at the same time it reformulates ideas of enlightenment, especially its critique of religion; and last but not least it entails – in contrast to the great narratives of enlightenment – a sceptical and to some extent tragic macro-narrative. In its kernel one finds the central message of psychoanalysis, the plot that the past has an overwhelming power over people’s present life, on an individual as well as a collective level. Insofar as Freud’s last prominent text contains a more or less pessimistic philosophy of history, demonstrating that human beings have always been and become the victims of their past. Under certain circumstances, it becomes possible to overcome the burden of the past and psychoanalysis is seen as an exemplary intervention on both levels. Religion is a field that brings together three keystones of psychoanalysis; anthropology, history and the philosophy of enlightenment. But the point is that, as Alfred North Whitehead has shown, religion as a compound phenomenon embraces at least four elements: 1) feeling and experience, the existential side, 2) rite, the aspect of performance, 3) myth, the narrative complex, and 4) dogma, the explicit discourse. I would add; 5) institution and power. In his occupation with Moses and the historical drama of monotheism, Freud is especially concerned with element 3 (myth) and element 4 (dogma), 1 This essay is an extended version of ‘Murder and Monotheism. A Detective Story in Close Reading’, in W. Müller-Funk, The Architecture of Modern Culture. Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory. New York: de Gruyter, 2012. Wolfgang Müller-Funk 18 but in some parts in element 5 (power relation). Quite clearly, Freud is interested in the phenomenon of rite, as the essay Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen (1907) shows; in the essay on Moses, the tradition of circumcision plays a certain role, but it is not central. What Freud does not discuss in this text is the first element, the mystical element of religion, which since the early Schleiermacher seems to be the common bond between all religions and the elementary offspring of religion as such. Freud has discussed this topic in Die Zukunft einer Illusion and in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur as a certain form of regression to the state of the absolute unconscious, to the Es. In this sense, religion, the oceanic feeling, is not seen as a phenomenon eo ipso but an illusionary reaction, a denial to become an adult person. In a preliminary remark from June 1938, Freud says with a short glance at his book Totem und Tabu (1912): “Since that time I have no longer been in any doubt that the only way to understand religious phenomena is by using the model of neurotic symptoms of the individual with which we are so familiar to see such phenomena as recurrences of long forgotten, meaningful events in the prehistory of the human family; I am convinced that in fact they owe their compulsive nature to that source, so that it is by virtue of their content of historical truth that they effect human beings.”2 The narrative structures of the individual human being and those of human communities are principally identical. But in the late essay on Moses it is quite clear that Freud also reflects on a completely different aspect, namely on the contribution of monotheism to establishing a stable symbolic order of the father, or to speak in a Freudian terminology, of the Über-Ich. One might say that religion in a Freudian sense is in the tension between two poles, the Es and the Über-Ich, the imaginary and the...

Share