Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable

by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

Book Overview

Moses and Monotheism, Freud's last major book and the only one specifically devoted to a Jewish theme, has proved to be one of the most controversial and enigmatic works in the Freudian canon. Among other things, Freud claims in the book that Moses was an Egyptian, that he derived the notion of monotheism from Egyptian concepts, and that after he introduced monotheism to the Jews he was killed by them. Since these historical and ethnographic...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300057563
• ISBN13: 9780300057560
• Release Date: July 1993
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating read

This is scholarship at its very best. Freud's struggle with his self-identity and the identity of his science is clearly documented in this book. Better than most trained psychoanalysts, the author detects most subtle ripples of the human mind, using clues provided by Freud's language, in his books and in his personal letters. By far the most nuanced study of the most complex personality of the century. I suspect Freud himself, being the cunning self-concealer that he was (like Goethe), would have resisted this interpretation, but to anyone who wants to understand psychoanalysis and its father, this book is indispensable.