Freud - Complete Works (788 page)

Moses And Monotheism

4895

   The phenomenon of latency in the
history of the Jewish religion, with which we are dealing, may be
explained, then, by the circumstance that the facts and ideas which
were intentionally disavowed by what may be called the official
historians were in fact never lost. Information about them
persisted in traditions which survived among the people. As we are
assured by Sellin, indeed, there was actually a tradition about the
end of Moses which flatly contradicted the official account and was
far nearer the truth. The same, we may assume, also applied to
other things which apparently ceased to exist at the same time as
Moses - to some of the contents of the Mosaic religion, which had
been unacceptable to the majority of his contemporaries.

   The remarkable fact with which we
are here confronted is, however, that these traditions, instead of
becoming weaker with time, became more and more powerful in the
course of centuries, forced their way into the later revisions of
the official accounts and finally showed themselves strong enough
to have a decisive influence on the thoughts and actions of the
people. The determinants which made this outcome possible are for
the moment, it is true, outside our knowledge.

   This fact is so remarkable that
we feel justified in looking at it once again. Our problem is
comprised in it. The Jewish people had abandoned the Aten religion
brought to them by Moses and had turned to the worship of another
god who differed little from the Baalim of the neighbouring
peoples. All the tendentious efforts of later times failed to
disguise this shameful fact. But the Mosaic religion had not
vanished without leaving a trace; some sort of memory of it had
kept alive - a possibly obscured and distorted tradition. And it
was this tradition of a great past which continued to operate (from
the background, as it were), which gradually acquired more and more
power over people’s minds and which in the end succeeded in
changing the god Yahweh into the Mosaic god and in re-awakening
into life the religion of Moses that had been introduced and then
abandoned long centuries before. That a tradition thus sunk in
oblivion should exercise such a powerful effect on the mental life
of a people is an unfamiliar idea to us. We find ourselves here in
the field of group psychology, where we do not feel at home. We
shall look about for analogies, for facts that are at least of a
similar nature, even though in different fields. And facts of that
sort are, I believe, to be found.

Moses And Monotheism

4896

   During the period at which, among
the Jews, the return of the religion of Moses was in preparation,
the Greek people found themselves in possession of an exceedingly
rich store of tribal legends and hero-myths. It is believed that
the ninth or eighth century B.C. saw the origin of the two Homeric
epics, which drew their material from this circle of legends. With
our present psychological insight we could, long before Schliemann
and Evans, have raised the question of where it was that the Greeks
obtained all the legendary material which was worked over by Homer
and the great Attic dramatists in their masterpieces. The answer
would have had to be that this people had probably experienced in
their prehistory a period of external brilliance and cultural
efflorescence which had perished in a historical catastrophe and of
which an obscure tradition survived in these legends. The
archaeological researches of our days have now confirmed this
suspicion, which in the past would certainly have been pronounced
too daring. These researches have uncovered the evidences of the
impressive Minoan-Mycenaean civilization, which had probably
already come to an end on the mainland of Greece before 1250 B.C.
There is scarcely a hint at it to be found in the Greek historians
of a later age: at most a remark that there was a time when the
Cretans exercised command of the sea, and the name of King Minos
and of his palace, the Labyrinth. That is all, and beyond it
nothing has remained but the traditions which were seized on by the
poets.

Moses And Monotheism

4897

   National epics of other peoples -
Germans, Indians, Finns - have come to light as well. It is the
business of historians of literature to investigate whether we may
assume the same determinants for their origin as with the Greeks.
Such an investigation would, I believe, yield a positive result.
Here is the determinant which we recognize: a piece of prehistory
which, immediately after it, would have been bound to appear rich
in content, important, splendid, and always, perhaps, heroic, but
which lies so far back, in such remote times, that only an obscure
and incomplete tradition informs later generations of it. Surprise
has been felt that the epic as an art-form has become extinct in
later times. The explanation may be that its determining cause no
longer exists. The old material was used up and for all later
events historical writing took the place of tradition. The greatest
heroic deeds of our days have not been able to inspire an epic, and
even Alexander the Great had a right to complain that he would find
no Homer.

   Long-past ages have a great and
often puzzling attraction for men’s imagination. Whenever
they are dissatisfied with their present surroundings - and this
happens often enough - they turn back to the past and hope that
they will now be able to prove the truth of the unextinguishable
dream of a golden age.¹ They are probably still under the
spell of their childhood, which is presented to them by their not
impartial memory as a time of uninterrupted bliss.

   If all that is left of the past
are the incomplete and blurred memories which we call tradition,
this offers an artist a peculiar attraction, for in that case he is
free to fill in the gaps in memory according to the desires of his
imagination and to picture the period which he wishes to reproduce
according to his intentions. One might almost say that the vaguer a
tradition has become the more serviceable it becomes for a poet. We
need not therefore be surprised at the importance of tradition for
imaginative writing, and the analogy with the manner in which epics
are determined will make us more inclined to accept the strange
hypothesis that it was the tradition of Moses which, for the Jews,
altered the worship of Yahweh in the direction of the old Mosaic
religion. But in other respects the two cases are still too
different. On the one hand the outcome is a poem and on the other a
religion; and in the latter instance we have assumed that, under
the spur of tradition, it was reproduced with a faithfulness for
which the instance of the epic can of course offer no counterpart.
Accordingly enough of our problem is left over to justify a need
for more apposite analogies.

  
¹
This was the situation on which Macaulay
based his
Lays of Ancient Rome
. He put himself in the place
of a minstrel who, depressed by the confused party strife of his
own day, presented his hearers with the self-sacrifice, the unity
and the patriotism of their ancestors.

Moses And Monotheism

4898

C

THE ANALOGY

   The only satisfying analogy to
the remarkable course of events that we have found in the history
of the Jewish religion lies in an apparently remote field; but it
is very complete, and approaches identity. In it we once more come
upon the phenomenon of latency, the emergence of unintelligible
manifestations calling for an explanation and an early, and later
forgotten, event as a necessary determinant. We also find the
characteristic of compulsion, which forces itself on the mind along
with an overpowering of logical thought - a feature which did not
come into account, for instance, in the genesis of the epic.

   This analogy is met with in
psychopathology, in the genesis of human neuroses - in a field,
that is to say, belonging to the psychology of individuals, while
religious phenomena have of course to be reckoned as part of group
psychology. We shall see that this analogy is not so surprising as
might at first be thought - indeed that it is more like a
postulate.

   We give the name of
traumas
to those impressions, experienced early and later
forgotten, to which we attach such great importance in the
aetiology of the neuroses. We may leave on one side the question of
whether the aetiology of the neuroses in general may be regarded as
traumatic. The obvious objection to this is that it is not possible
in every case to discover a manifest trauma in the neurotic
subject’s earliest history. We must often resign ourselves to
saying that all we have before us is an unusual, abnormal reaction
to experiences and demands which affect everyone, but are worked
over and dealt with by other people in another manner which may be
called normal. When we have nothing else at our disposal for
explaining a neurosis but hereditary and constitutional
dispositions, we are naturally tempted to say that it was not
acquired but developed.

Moses And Monotheism

4899

   But in this connection two points
must be stressed. Firstly, the genesis of a neurosis invariably
goes back to very early impressions in childhood.¹ Secondly,
it is true that there are cases which are distinguished as being
‘traumatic’ because their effects go back unmistakably
to one or more powerful impressions in these early times -
impressions which have escaped being dealt with normally, so that
one is inclined to judge that if they had not occurred the neurosis
would not have come about either. It would be enough for our
purposes if we were obliged to restrict the analogy we are in
search of to these traumatic cases. But the gap between the two
groups appears not to be unbridgeable. It is quite possible to
unite the two aetiological determinants under a single conception;
it is merely a question of how one defines ‘traumatic’.
If we may assume that the experience acquires its traumatic
character only as a result of a quantitative factor - that is to
say, that in every case it is an excess in demand that is
responsible for an experience evoking unusual pathological
reactions - then we can easily arrive at the expedient of saying
that something acts as a trauma in the case of one constitution but
in the case of another would have no such effect. In this way we
reach the concept of a sliding ‘complemental series’ as
it is called, in which two factors converge in fulfilling an
aetiological requirement. A less of one factor is balanced by a
more of the other; as a rule both factors operate together and it
is only at the two ends of the series that there can be any
question of a simple motive being at work. After mentioning this,
we can disregard the distinction between traumatic and
non-traumatic aetiologies as irrelevant to the analogy we are in
search of.

   In spite of a risk of repetition,
it will perhaps be as well to bring together here the facts which
comprise the analogy that is significant for us. They are as
follows. Our researches have shown that what we call the phenomena
(symptoms) of a neurosis are the result of certain experiences and
impressions which for that very reason we regard as aetiological
traumas. We now have two tasks before us: to discover (1) the
common characteristics of these experiences and (2) those of
neurotic symptoms, and in doing so we need not avoid drawing a
somewhat schematic picture.

  
¹
This therefore makes it nonsensical to say
that one is practising psycho-analysis if one excludes from
examination and consideration precisely these earliest periods - as
happens in some quarters.

Moses And Monotheism

4900

   (1) (
a
) All these traumas
occur in early childhood up to about the fifth year. Impressions
from the time at which a child is beginning to talk stand out as
being of particular interest; the periods between the ages of two
and four seem to be the most important; it cannot be determined
with certainty how long after birth this period of receptivity
begins. (
b
) The experiences in question are as a rule
totally forgotten, they are not accessible to memory and fall
within the period of infantile amnesia, which is usually broken
into by a few separate mnemic residues, what are known as
‘screen memories’. (
c
) They relate to
impressions of a sexual and aggressive nature, and no doubt also to
early injuries to the ego (narcissistic mortifications). In this
connection it should be remarked that such young children make no
sharp distinction between sexual and aggressive acts, as they do
later. (Cf. the misunderstanding of the sexual act in a sadistic
sense.) The predominance of the sexual factor is, of course, most
striking and calls for theoretical consideration.

   These three points - the very
early appearance of these experiences (during the first five years
of life), the fact of their being forgotten and their
sexual-aggressive content - are closely interconnected. The traumas
are either experiences on the subject’s own body or sense
perceptions, mostly of something seen and heard - that is,
experiences or impressions. The interconnection of these three
points is established by a theory, a product of the work of
analysis which alone can bring about a knowledge of the forgotten
experiences, or, to put it more vividly but also more incorrectly,
bring them back to memory. The theory is that, in contrast to
popular opinion, the sexual life of human beings (or what
corresponds to it later on) exhibits an early efflorescence which
comes to an end at about the fifth year and is followed by what is
known as the period of latency (till puberty) in which there is no
further development of sexuality and indeed what has been attained
undergoes a retrogression. This theory is confirmed by the
anatomical investigation of the growth of the internal genitalia;
it leads us to suppose that the human race is descended from a
species of animal which reached sexual maturity in five years and
rouses a suspicion that the postponement of sexual life and its
diphasic onset are intimately connected with the history of
hominization. Human beings appear to be the only animal organisms
with a latency period and sexual retardation of this kind.
Investigations on the primates (which, so far as I know, are not
available) would be indispensable for testing this theory. It
cannot be a matter of indifference psychologically that the period
of infantile amnesia coincides with this early period of sexuality.
It may be that this state of things provides the true determinant
for the possibility of neurosis, which is in a sense a human
prerogative and from this point of view appears as a vestige - a
‘survival’ - of primaeval times like certain portions
of our bodily anatomy.