Freud - Complete Works (796 page)

   Going back to ethics, we may say
in conclusion that a part of its precepts are justified rationally
by the necessity for delimiting the rights of society as against
the individual, the rights of the individual as against society and
those of individuals as against one another. But what seems to us
so grandiose about ethics, so mysterious and, in a mystical
fashion, so self-evident, owes these characteristics to its
connection with religion, its origin from the will of the
father.

Moses And Monotheism

4941

E

WHAT IS TRUE IN RELIGION

   How enviable, to those of us who
are poor in faith, do those enquirers seem who are convinced of the
existence of a Supreme Being! To that great Spirit the world offers
no problems, for he himself created all its institutions. How
comprehensive, how exhaustive and how definitive are the doctrines
of believers compared with the laborious, paltry and fragmentary
attempts at explanation which are the most we are able to achieve!
The divine Spirit, which is itself the ideal of ethical perfection,
has planted in men the knowledge of that ideal and, at the same
time, the urge to assimilate their own nature to it. They perceive
directly what is higher and nobler and what is lower and more base.
Their affective life is regulated in accordance with their distance
from the ideal at any moment. When they approach to it - at their
perihelion, as it were - they are brought high satisfaction; when,
at their aphelion, they have become remote from it, the punishment
is severe unpleasure. All of this is laid down so simply and so
unshakeably. We can only regret that certain experiences in life
and observations in the world make it impossible for us to accept
the premiss of the existence of such a Supreme Being. As though the
world had not riddles enough, we are set the new problem of
understanding how these other people have been able to acquire
their belief in the Divine Being and whence that belief obtained
its immense power, which overwhelms ‘reason and
science’.

   Let us return to the more modest
problem which has occupied us hitherto. We wanted to explain the
origin of the special character of the Jewish people, a character
which is probably what has made their survival to the present day
possible. We found that the man Moses impressed this character on
them by giving them a religion which increased their self-esteem so
much that they thought themselves superior to all other peoples.
Thereafter they survived by keeping apart from others. Mixtures of
blood interfered little with this, since what held them together
was an ideal factor, the possession in common of certain
intellectual and emotional wealth. The religion of Moses led to
this result because (1) it allowed the people to take a share in
the grandeur of a new idea of God, (2) it asserted that this people
had been chosen by this great God and were destined to receive
evidences of his special favour and (3) it forced upon the people
an advance in intellectuality which, important enough in itself,
opened the way, in addition, to the appreciation of intellectual
work and to further renunciations of instinct.

   This is what we have arrived at.
And, though we do not wish to take back any of it, we cannot hide
from ourselves that it is somehow or other unsatisfying. The cause
does not, so to speak, match the effect; the fact that we want to
explain seems to be of a different order of magnitude from
everything by which we explain it. May it be that all the
investigations we have so far made have not uncovered the whole of
the motivation but only a certain superficial layer, and that
behind it another very important factor awaits discovery? In view
of the extraordinary complexity of all causation in life and
history, something of the sort was to be expected.

Moses And Monotheism

4942

   Access to this deeper motivation
would seem to be given at a particular point in the previous
discussions. The religion of Moses did not produce its effects
immediately but in a remarkably indirect manner. This does not mean
to say simply that it did not work at once, that it took long
periods of time, hundreds of years, to deploy its full effect, for
that is self-evident when it is a question of the imprinting of a
people’s character. But the restriction relates to a fact
which we have derived from the history of the Jewish religion or,
if you like, have introduced into it. We have said that after a
certain time the Jewish people rejected the religion of Moses once
more - whether they did so completely or retained some of its
precepts we cannot guess. If we suppose that in the long period of
the seizure of Canaan and the struggle with the peoples inhabiting
it the Yahweh religion did not differ essentially from the worship
of the other Baalim, we shall be on historical ground in spite of
all the later tendentious efforts to throw a veil over this shaming
state of things.

   The religion of Moses, however,
had not disappeared without leaving a trace. A kind of memory of it
had survived, obscured and distorted, supported, perhaps, among
individual members of the priestly caste by ancient records. And it
was this tradition of a great past which continued to work in the
background, as it were, which gradually gained more and more power
over men’s minds, and which finally succeeded in transforming
the god Yahweh into the god of Moses and in calling back to life
the religion of Moses which had been established and then abandoned
long centuries earlier.

   In a previous portion of this
study we have considered what assumption seems inevitable if we are
to find such an achievement of tradition comprehensible.

Moses And Monotheism

4943

F

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

   There are a quantity of similar
processes among those which the analytic investigation of mental
life has taught us to know. Some of them are described as
pathological, others are counted among the diversity of normal
events. But that matters little, since the boundaries between the
two are not sharply drawn, their mechanisms are to a large extent
the same, and it is of far more importance whether the alterations
in question take place in the ego itself or whether they confront
it as alien to it - in which case they are known as symptoms.

   From the mass of material I shall
first bring forward some cases which relate to the development of
character. Take, for instance, the girl who has reached a state of
the most decided opposition to her mother. She has cultivated all
those characteristics which she has seen that her mother lacked,
and has avoided everything that reminded her of her mother. We may
supplement this by saying that in her early years, like every
female child, she adopted an identification with her mother and
that she is now rebelling against this energetically. But when this
girl marries and herself becomes a wife and a mother, we need not
be surprised to find that she begins to grow more and more like the
mother to whom she was so antagonistic, till finally the
identification with her which she surmounted is unmistakably
re-established. The same thing happens too with boys; and even the
great Goethe, who in the period of his genius certainly looked down
upon his unbending and pedantic father, in his old age developed
traits which formed a part of his father’s character. The
outcome can become even more striking when the contrast between the
two personalities is sharper. A young man whose fate it was to grow
up beside a worthless father, began by developing, in defiance of
him, into a capable, trustworthy and honourable person. In the
prime of life his character was reversed, and thenceforward he
behaved as though he had taken this same father as a model. In
order not to miss the connection with our theme, we must keep in
mind the fact that at the beginning of such a course of events
there is always an identification with the father in early
childhood. This is afterwards repudiated, and even overcompensated,
but in the end establishes itself once more.

Moses And Monotheism

4944

   It has long since become common
knowledge that the experiences of a person’s first five years
exercise a determining effect on his life, which nothing later can
withstand. Much that deserves knowing might be said about the way
in which these early impressions maintain themselves against any
influences in more mature periods of life - but it would not be
relevant here. It may, however, be less well known that the
strongest compulsive influence arises from impressions which
impinge upon a child at a time when we would have to regard his
psychical apparatus as not yet completely receptive. The fact
itself cannot be doubted; but it is so puzzling that we may make it
more comprehensible by comparing it with a photographic exposure
which can be developed after any interval of time and transformed
into a picture. I am nevertheless glad to point out that this
uncomfortable discovery of ours has been anticipated by an
imaginative writer, with the boldness that is permitted to poets.
E. T. A. Hoffmann used to trace back the wealth of figures that put
themselves at his disposal for his creative writings to the
changing images and impressions which he had experienced during a
journey of some weeks in a post-chaise while he was still an infant
at his mother’s breast. What children have experienced at the
age of two and have not understood, need never be remembered by
them except in dreams; they may only come to know of it through
psycho-analytic treatment. But at some later time it will break
into their life with obsessional impulses, it will govern their
actions, it will decide their sympathies and antipathies and will
quite often determine their choice of a love-object, for which it
is so frequently impossible to find a rational basis. The two
points at which these facts touch upon our problem cannot be
mistaken.

   First, there is the remoteness of
the period concerned,¹ which is recognized here as the truly
determining factor - in the special state of the memory, for
instance, which in the case of these childhood experiences we
classify as ‘unconscious’. We expect to find an analogy
in this with the state which we are seeking to attribute to
tradition in the mental life of the people. It was not easy, to be
sure, to introduce the idea of the unconscious into group
psychology.

  
¹
Here, too, a poet may speak. In order to
explain his attachment, he imagines: ‘Ach, du warst in
abgelebten Zeiten meine Schwester oder meine Frau.’
[Literally: ‘Ah, you were, in a past life, my sister or my
wife.’]

Moses And Monotheism

4945

   Regular contributions are made to
the phenomena we are in search of by the mechanisms which lead to
the formation of neuroses. Here again the determining events occur
in early childhood times, but here the stress is not upon the
time
but upon the process by which the event is met, the
reaction to it. We can describe it schematically thus. As a result
of the experience, an instinctual demand arises which calls for
satisfaction. The ego refuses that satisfaction, either because it
is paralysed by the magnitude of the demand or because it
recognizes it as a danger. The former of these grounds is the more
primary one; both of them amount to the avoidance of a situation of
danger. The ego fends off the danger by the process of repression.
The instinctual impulse is in some way inhibited, its precipitating
cause, with its attendant perceptions and ideas, is forgotten.
This, however, is not the end of the process: the instinct has
either retained its forces, or collects them again, or it is
reawakened by some new precipitating cause. Thereupon it renews its
demand, and, since the path to normal satisfaction remains closed
to it by what we may call the scar of repression, somewhere, at a
weak spot, it opens another path for itself to what is known as a
substitutive satisfaction, which comes to light as a symptom,
without the acquiescence of the ego, but also without its
understanding. All the phenomena of the formation of symptoms may
justly be described as the ‘return of the repressed’.
Their distinguishing characteristic, however, is the far-reaching
distortion to which the returning material has been subjected as
compared with the original. It will perhaps be thought that this
last group of facts has carried us too far away from the similarity
with tradition. But we ought not to regret it if it has brought us
close to the problems of the renunciation of instinct.

Moses And Monotheism

4946

G

HISTORICAL TRUTH

   We have undertaken all these
psychological diversions in order to make it more credible to us
that the religion of Moses only carried through its effect on the
Jewish people as a tradition. It is likely that we have not
achieved more than a certain degree of probability. Let us suppose,
however, that we have succeeded in completely proving it. Even so
the impression would remain that we have merely satisfied the
qualitative
factor of what was demanded, but not the
quantitative one as well. There is an element of grandeur about
everything to do with the origin of a religion, certainly including
the Jewish one, and this is not matched by the explanations we have
hitherto given. Some other factor must be involved to which there
is little that is analogous and nothing that is of the same kind,
something unique and something of the same order of magnitude as
what has come out of it, as religion itself.