Letter to Georg fuchs 1 страница

(1931)

After reading your letter I felt a wave of the deepest sympathy, but it was soon halted by two reflections - an internal difficulty and an external obstacle. A sentence from your own preface offers me an apt expression of the former: ‘No doubt, however, there are people who have so poor an opinion of the civilized humanity of to-day that they deny the existence of a world conscience.’ I believe I am one of those people. For instance, I could not subscribe to the assertion that the treatment of convicted prisoners is a disgrace to our civilization. On the contrary, a voice would tell me, it is in perfect harmony with our civilization, a necessary expression of the brutality and lack of understanding which dominate the civilized humanity of the present time. And if by some miracle people suddenly became convinced that the reform of the penal system is the first and most urgent task before our civilization, what else would emerge than that capitalist society has not now the means for meeting the expenditure which that reform would demand? The second, the external, difficulty is brought to light in the passages in your letter in which you exalt me into a recognized intellectual leader and cultural innovator and attribute to me the privilege of having the ear of the civilized world. I only wish, my dear Sir, that it were so: I should not in that case refuse your request. But it seems to me that I am persona ingrata, if not ingratissima, with the German people - and moreover with the learned and the unlearned alike. I hope most positively that you will not think that I feel seriously aggrieved by these signs of disapproval. It is tens of years since I have been so foolish; measured by your example, moreover, it would be too ridiculous. I only mention these trivialities to confirm the fact that I am no desirable advocate for a book which seeks to kindle its readers’ sympathies on behalf of a good cause. Let me add that your book is a moving one, noble, wise and good.

PREFACE TO RICHARD STERBA’S DICTIONARY OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1936)

July 3, 1932.

Dear Dr. Sterba, Your Dictionary gives me the impression of being a valuable aid to learners and of being a fine achievement on its own account. The precision and correctness of the individual entries is in fact of commendable excellence. English and French translations of the headings are not indispensable but would add further to the value of the work. I do not overlook the fact that the path from the letter A to the end of the alphabet is a very long one, and that to follow it would mean an enormous burden of work for you. So do not do it unless you feel an internal obligation - only obey a compulsion of that kind and certainly not any external pressure.

Yours sincerely,

Freud.4

PREFACE TO MARIE BONAPARTE’S

THE LIFE AND WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE: A PSYCHO-ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION

(1933)

In this volume my friend and pupil, Marie Bonaparte, has directed the light of psycho-analysis upon the life and work of a great writer of a pathological type. Thanks to her interpretative efforts, we can now understand how much of the characteristics of his work were determined by their author’s special nature; but we also learn that this was itself the precipitate of powerful emotional ties and painful experiences in his early youth. Investigations of this kind are not intended to explain an author’s genius, but they show what motive forces aroused it and what material was offered to him by destiny. There is a particular fascination in studying the laws of the human mind as exemplified in outstanding individuals.

TO THOMAS MANN ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY

(1935)

My Dear Thomas Mann, Accept as a friend my affectionate greetings on your sixtieth birthday. I am one of your ‘oldest’ readers and admirers and I might wish you a very long and happy life as is the custom on such occasions. But I shall not do so. Wishing is cheap and strikes me as a relapse into the days when people believed in the magical omnipotence of thoughts. I think, too, from my most personal experience, that it is well if a compassionate fate sets a timely end to the length of our life.

Nor do I think the practice deserves imitation by which affection on these festive occasions disregards respect, and by which the subject of the celebration is compelled to hear himself loaded with praise as a man and analysed and criticized as an artist. I shall not be guilty of such presumption. I can allow myself something else however. In the name of a countless number of your contemporaries I can express to you our confidence that you will never do or say - for an author’s words are deeds - anything that is cowardly or base. Even in times and circumstances that perplex the judgement you will take the right path and point it out to others.

Yours very sincerely,

Freud

June 1935.6

MOSES AND MONOTHEISM THREE ESSAYS (1939)

I MOSES AN EGYPTIAN

To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken, least of all by someone who is himself one of them. But we cannot allow any such reflection to induce us to put the truth aside in favour of what are supposed to be national interests; and, moreover, the clarification of a set of facts may be expected to bring us a gain in knowledge.

The man Moses, who set the Jewish people free, who gave them their laws and founded their religion, dates from such remote times that we cannot evade a preliminary enquiry as to whether he was a historical personage or a creature of legend. If he lived, it was in the thirteenth, though it may have been in the fourteenth, century before Christ. We have no information about him except from the sacred books of the Jews and their traditions as recorded in writing. Although a decision on the question thus lacks final certainty, an overwhelming majority of historians have nevertheless pronounced in favour of the view that Moses was a real person and that the Exodus from Egypt associated with him did in fact take place. It is justly argued that the later history of the people of Israel would be incomprehensible if this premiss were not accepted. Indeed, science to-day has become altogether more circumspect and handles traditions far more indulgently than in the early days of historical criticism.

The first thing that attracts our attention about the figure of Moses is his name, which is ‘Mosheh’ in Hebrew. ‘What is its origin?’ we may ask, ‘and what does it mean?’ As we know, the account in the second chapter of Exodus already provides an answer. We are told there that the Egyptian princess who rescued the infant boy from exposure in the Nile gave him that name, putting forward an etymological reason: ‘because I drew him out of the water’. This explanation, however, is clearly inadequate. ‘The Biblical interpretation of the name as "he who was drawn out of the water"’, argues a writer in the Jüdisches Lexicon,¹ ‘is popular etymology, with which, to begin with, it is impossible to harmonize the active form of the Hebrew word - for "Mosheh" can at most only mean "he who draws out".’ We can support this rejection by two further arguments: in the first place, it is absurd to attribute to an Egyptian princess a derivation of the name from the Hebrew, and secondly, the water out of which the child was drawn was most probably not the water of the Nile.

¹ Herlitz and Kirschner (1930), 4 (1), 303.9

On the other hand, a suspicion has long been expressed, and in many different quarters, that the name ‘Moses’ is derived from the Egyptian vocabulary. Instead of enumerating all the authorities who have argued in this sense, I will quote the relevant passage from a comparatively recent book, The Dawn of Conscience (1934), by J. H. Breasted, a writer whose History of Egypt (1906) is regarded as a standard work: ‘It is important to notice that his name, Moses, was Egyptian. It is simply the Egyptian word "mose" meaning "child", and is an abridgement of a fuller form of such names as "Amen-mose" meaning "Amon-a-child" or "Ptah-mose" meaning "Ptah-a-child", these forms themselves being likewise abbreviations for the complete form "Amon-(has-given)-a-child" or "Ptah-(has given)-a-child". The abbreviation "child" early became a convenient rapid form for the cumbrous full name, and the name Mose, "child", is not uncommon on the Egyptian monuments. The father of Moses without doubt prefixed to his son’s name that of an Egyptian god like Amon or Ptah, and this divine name was gradually lost in current usage, till the boy was called "Mose". (The final s is an addition drawn from the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It is not in the Hebrew which has "Mosheh").’¹ I have repeated this passage word for word and I am by no means ready to share responsibility for its details. I am also rather surprised that Breasted has failed to mention precisely the analogous theophorous names which figure in the list of Egyptian kings, such as Ahmose, Thoth-mose and Ra-mose.

¹ Breasted, 1934, 350.0

Now we should have expected that one of the many people who have recognized that ‘Moses’ is an Egyptian name would also have drawn the conclusion or would at least have considered the possibility that the person who bore this Egyptian name may himself have been an Egyptian. In relation to modern times we have no hesitation in drawing such conclusions, though nowadays people bear not one name but two - a family name and a personal name - and though a change of name or the adoption of a similar one in fresh circumstances is not beyond possibility. Thus we are not in the least surprised to find it confirmed that the poet Chamisso was French by birth, that Napoleon Buonaparte, on the other hand, was of Italian extraction and that Benjamin Disraeli was indeed an Italian Jew, as we should expect from his name. In relation to ancient and primitive times, one would have thought that a conclusion such as this as to a person’s nationality based on his name would have seemed far more reliable and in fact unimpeachable. Nevertheless, so far as I know, no historian has drawn this conclusion in the case of Moses - not even any of those who, once again like Breasted himself (1934, 354), are ready to assume that ‘Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’.¹

What prevented their doing so cannot be judged with certainty. Possibly their reverence for Biblical tradition was invincible. Possibly the notion that the man Moses might have been anything but a Hebrew seemed too monstrous. However that may be, it emerges that the recognition that the name of Moses is Egyptian has not been looked upon as affording decisive evidence of his origin, and that no further conclusions have been drawn from it. If the question of this great man’s nationality is regarded as important, it would seem to be desirable to bring forward fresh material that would help towards answering it.

¹ Although the suspicion that Moses was an Egyptian has been voiced often enough without reference to his name, from the earliest times up to the present.1

That is what my short paper aims at doing. Its claim to be given a place in the pages of Imago rests on the fact that the substance of what it has to contribute is an application of psycho-analysis. The argument arrived at in this way will undoubtedly only impress that minority of readers who are familiar with analytic thinking and who are able to appreciate its findings. To them, however, it will, I hope, appear significant.

In 1909 Otto Rank, who was at that time still under my influence, published, following a suggestion of mine, a book bearing the title Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden.¹ It deals with the fact that ‘almost all the prominent civilized nations... began at an early stage to glorify their heroes, legendary kings and princes, founders of religions, dynasties, empires or cities, in brief their national heroes, in a number of poetic tales and legends. The history of the birth and of the early life of these personalities came to be especially invested with phantastic features, which, indifferent peoples, even though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other, present a baffling similarity and in part, indeed, a literal conformity. Many investigators have been impressed with this fact, which has long been recognized.’ If, following Rank, we construct (by a technique a little like Galton’s) an ‘average legend’ that brings into prominence the essential features of all these stories, we arrive at the following picture:

‘The hero is the child of the most aristocratic parents; usually the son of a king.

‘His conception is preceded by difficulties, such as abstinence or prolonged barrenness or his parents having to have intercourse in secret owing to external prohibitions or obstacles. During the pregnancy, or even earlier, there is a prophecy (in the form of a dream or oracle) cautioning against his birth, usually threatening danger to his father.

¹ It is far from being my intention to belittle the value of Rank’s independent contributions to the work.

‘As a result of this the new-born child is condemned to death or to exposure, usually by the orders of his father or of someone representing him; as a rule he is given over to the water in a casket.

‘He is afterwards rescued by animals or by humble people (such as shepherds) and is suckled by a female animal or by a humble woman.

‘After he has grown up, he rediscovers his aristocratic parents after highly variegated experiences, takes his revenge on his father, on the one hand, and is acknowledged on the other and achieves greatness and fame.’

The oldest of the historical figures to whom this myth of birth is attached is Sargon of Agade, the founder of Babylon (c. 2800 B.C.). For us in particular it will not be without interest to quote the account of it, which is attributed to him himself:

‘Sargon, the mighty King, the King of Agade am I. My mother was a Vestal, my father I knew not, while my father’s brother dwelt in the mountains. In my city, Azupirani, which lies on the bank of the Euphrates, my mother, the Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid me in a coffer made of reeds, closed my doorway with pitch, and let me down into the river, which did not drown me. The river carried me to Akki, the drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, lifted me out in the kindness of his heart. Akki, the drawer of water, brought me up as his own son. Akki, the drawer of water, made me his gardener, While I worked as a gardener, Ishtar grew fond of me, I became King and for forty-five years I held kingly sway.’

The names most familiar to us in the series which begins with Sargon of Agade are Moses, Cyrus and Romulus. But in addition to these Rank has brought together a whole number of other heroic figures from poetry or legend, of whom the same story of their youth is told, either in its entirety or in easily recognizable fragments - including Oedipus, Karna, Paris, Telephos, Perseus, Heracles, Gilgamesh, Amphion and Zethos, and others.3

Rank’s researches have made us acquainted with the source and purpose of this myth. I need only refer to them with some brief indications. A hero is someone who has had the courage to rebel against his father and has in the end victoriously overcome him. Our myth traces this struggle back as far as the individual’s prehistory, for it represents him as being born against his father’s will and rescued despite his father’s evil intention. The exposure in a casket is an unmistakable symbolic representation of birth: the casket is the womb and the water is the amniotic fluid. The parent-child relationship is represented in countless dreams by pulling out of the water or rescuing from the water. When a people’s imagination attaches the myth of birth which we are discussing to an outstanding figure, it is intending in that way to recognize him as a hero and to announce that he has fulfilled the regular pattern of a hero’s life. In fact, however, the source of the whole poetic fiction is what is known as a child’s ‘family romance’, in which the son reacts to a change in his emotional relation to his parents and in particular to his father. A child’s earliest years are dominated by an enormous overvaluation of his father; in accordance with this a king and queen in dreams and fairy tales invariably stand for parents. Later, under the influence of rivalry and of disappointment in real life, the child begins to detach himself from his parents and to adopt a critical attitude towards his father. Thus the two families in the myth - the aristocratic one and the humble one - are both of them reflections of the child’s own family as they appeared to him in successive periods of his life.

We may fairly say that these explanations make the widespread and uniform nature of myths of the birth of heroes fully intelligible. For that reason it is all the more deserving of interest that the legend of the birth and exposure of Moses occupies a special position and, indeed, in one essential respect contradicts the rest.4

Let us start from the two families between which, according to the legend, the child’s destiny is played out. According to the analytic interpretation, as we know, the families are one and the same and are only differentiated chronologically. In the typical form of the legend, it is the first family, the one into which the child is born, which is the aristocratic one, most often of royal rank; the second family, the one in which the child grows up: is the one that is humble or has fallen on evil days. This tallies, moreover, with the circumstances to which the interpretation traces the legend back. Only in the legend of Oedipus is this difference blurred: the child which has been exposed by one royal family is received by another royal couple. It can scarcely be by chance, one feels, that precisely in this example the original identity of the two families may be dimly perceived in the legend itself. The social contrast between the two families provides the myth - which, as we know, is designed to stress the heroic nature of a great man with a second function which becomes of special significance when applied to historical personages. For the myth can also be employed to create a patent of nobility for the hero, to raise his social standing. To the Medes, Cyrus was a foreign conqueror; but by means of a legend of exposure he became the grandson of their king. The same applies to Romulus. If any such person existed, he must have been an adventurer of unknown origin, an upstart; the legend, however, made him offspring and heir of the royal house of Alba Longa.

With Moses things were quite different. In his case the first family, elsewhere the aristocratic one, was sufficiently modest. He was the child of Jewish Levites. But the place of the second family, elsewhere the humble one, was taken by the royal house of Egypt; the princess brought him up as her own son. This deviation from type has puzzled many people. Eduard Meyer, and others following him, assumed that originally the legend was different. Pharaoh, according to them, had been warned by a prophetic dream¹ that a son born to his daughter would bring danger to him and his kingdom. He therefore had the child exposed in the Nile after his birth. But he was rescued by Jewish people and brought up as their child. For ‘nationalist motives’ (as Rank puts it²) the legend would then have been given the modified form in which we know it.

¹ This is also mentioned in the account given by Flavius Josephus.

² Rank, 1909, 80 n.5

A moment’s reflection, however, tells us that an original legend of Moses like this, one no longer deviating from the other legends, cannot have existed. For it was either of Egyptian or of Jewish origin. The first alternative is ruled out: the Egyptians had no motive for glorifying Moses, since he was no hero to them. We are to suppose, then, that the legend was created among the Jewish people - that is to say, that it was attached in its familiar form to the figure of their leader. But it was totally unsuitable for that purpose, for what would be the use to a people of a legend which made their great man into a foreigner?

The legend of Moses, in the form in which we have it to-day, falls notably short of its secret intention. If Moses was not of royal birth, the legend could not stamp him as a hero; if it left him as a Jewish child, it had done nothing to raise his social standing. Only one small fragment of the entire myth remains effective: the assurance that the child had survived in the face of powerful external forces. (This feature recurs in the story of the childhood of Jesus, in which King Herod takes over the role of Pharaoh.) Thus we are in fact free to suppose that some later and clumsy adapter of the material of the legend found an opportunity for introducing into the story of his hero Moses something which resembled the classical exposure legends marking out a hero, but which, on account of the special circumstances of the case, was not applicable to Moses,

Our investigations might have had to rest content with this inconclusive and, moreover, uncertain outcome, and they might have done nothing towards answering the question of whether Moses was an Egyptian. There is, however, another and perhaps more hopeful line of approach to an assessment of the legend of exposure.

Let us return to the two families of the myth. At the level of analytic interpretation they are, as we know, identical; whereas at the level of the myth they are differentiated into an aristocratic family and a humble one. Where, however, the figure to whom the myth is attached is a historical one, there is a third level - that of reality. One of the families is the real one, in which the person in question (the great man) was actually born and grew up; the other is fictitious, fabricated by the myth in pursuit of its own intentions. As a rule the humble family is the real one and the aristocratic family the fabricated one. The situation in the case of Moses seemed somehow different. And here the new line of approach will perhaps lead to a clarification: in every instance which it has been possible to test, the first family, the one from which the child was exposed, was the invented one, and the second one, in which he was received and grew up, was the real one. If we have the courage to recognize this assertion as universally true and as applying also to the legend of Moses, then all at once we see things clearly: Moses was an Egyptian - probably an aristocrat - whom the legend was designed to turn into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion. The exposure in the water was at its correct point in the story; but, in order to fit in with the fresh purpose, its aim had to be somewhat violently twisted. From being a way of sacrificing the child, it was turned into a means of rescuing him.

The deviation of the legend of Moses from all the others of its kind can be traced back to a special feature of his history. Whereas normally a hero, in the course of his life, rises above his humble beginnings, the heroic life of the man Moses began with his stepping down from his exalted position and descending to the level of the Children of Israel.

We started on this brief enquiry in the expectation of deriving a fresh argument from it in support of the suspicion that Moses was an Egyptian. We have seen that the first argument, based on his name, failed with many people to carry conviction.¹ We must be prepared to find that this new argument, based on an analysis of the legend of exposure, may have no better success. It will no doubt be objected that the circumstances of the construction and transformation of legends are, after all, too obscure to justify a conclusion such as ours and that the traditions surrounding the heroic figure of Moses - with all their confusion and contradictions and their unmistakable signs of centuries of continuous and tendentious revisions and superimpositions - are bound to baffle every effort to bring to light the kernel of historical truth that lies behind them. I do not myself share this dissenting attitude but neither am I in a position to refute it.

¹ Thus Eduard Meyer writes (1905, 651): ‘The name "Moses" is probably Egyptian, and the name "Pinchas" in the priestly family of Shiloh... is undoubtedly Egyptian. Of course this does not prove that these families were of Egyptian origin, but, no doubt, that they had connections with Egypt.’ We may ask, to be sure, what sort of connections this is supposed to make us think of.7

If no more certainty could be reached than this, why, it may be asked, have I brought this enquiry into public notice at all? I am sorry to say that even my justification for doing so cannot go beyond hints. For if one allows oneself to be carried away by the two arguments which I have put forward here, and if one sets out to take the hypothesis seriously that Moses was an aristocratic Egyptian, very interesting and far-reaching prospects are opened up. With the help of some not very remote assumptions, we shall, I believe, be able to understand the motives which led Moses in the unusual step he took and, closely related to this, to obtain a grasp of the possible basis of a number of the characteristics and peculiarities of the laws and religion which he gave to the Jewish people; and we shall even be led on to important considerations regarding the origin of monotheist religions in general. Such weighty conclusions cannot, however, be founded on psychological probabilities alone. Even if one accepts the fact of Moses being an Egyptian as a first historical foothold, one would need to have at least a second firm fact in order to defend the wealth of emerging possibilities against the criticism of their being a product of the imagination and too remote from reality. Objective evidence of the period to which the life of Moses and with it the Exodus from Egypt are to be referred would perhaps have fulfilled this requirement. But this has not been obtainable, and it will therefore be better to leave unmentioned any further implications of the discovery that Moses was an Egyptian.

II IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN...

In an earlier contribution to this periodical,¹ I attempted to bring up a fresh argument in support of the hypothesis that the man Moses, the liberator and law-giver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian. It had long been observed that his name was derived from the Egyptian vocabulary, though the fact had not been properly appreciated. What I added was that the interpretation of the myth of exposure which was linked with Moses necessarily led to the inference that he was an Egyptian whom the needs of a people sought to make into a Jew. I remarked at the end of my paper that important and far-reaching implications followed from the hypothesis that Moses was an Egyptian, but that I was not prepared to argue publicly in favour of these implications, since they were based only on psychological probabilities and lacked any objective proof. The greater the importance of the views arrived at in this way, the more strongly one feels the need to beware of exposing them without a secure basis to the critical assaults of the world around one - like a bronze statue with feet of clay. Not even the most tempting probability is a protection against error; even if all the parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, one must reflect that what is probable is not necessarily the truth and that the truth is not always probable. And lastly, it did not seem attractive to find oneself classed with the schoolmen and Talmudists who delight in exhibiting their ingenuity without regard to how remote from reality their thesis may be.

Notwithstanding these hesitations, which weigh as much with me to-day as they did before, the outcome of my conflicting motives is a decision to produce the present sequel to my earlier communication. But once again this is not the whole story nor the most important part of the whole story.

¹ Imago, 23 (1937).9

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If, then, Moses was an Egyptian - our first yield from this hypothesis is a fresh enigma and one which it is hard to solve. If a people or a tribe¹ sets out upon a great undertaking, it is only to be expected that one of its members will take his place as their leader or will be chosen for that post. But it is not easy to guess what could induce an aristocratic Egyptian - a prince, perhaps, or a priest or high official - to put himself at the head of a crowd of immigrant foreigners at a backward level of civilization and to leave his country with them. The well known contempt felt by the Egyptians for foreign nationals makes such a proceeding particularly unlikely. Indeed I could well believe that this has been precisely why even those historians who have recognized that the man’s name was Egyptian, and who have ascribed to him all the wisdom of the Egyptians, have been unwilling to accept the obvious possibility that Moses was an Egyptian.

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