IPA Book Launch of Freud’s Moses/Eran Rolnik
April 29 2023
It is always a pleasure to celebrate a new book. One is even happier to participate in such party when all that was required of one was to submit a chapter and trust in the editorial skills and good taste of an experienced scholar, who is not only enthusiastic but also knowledgeable to an unusual degree in the subject matter of his proposed publication. Thank you Larry Brown for the invitation to contribute a chapter on Freud’s “Book of Moses”, and to let me be a part of an exceptional assembly of psychoanalytic writers.
Founded in 1990’s, the series “contemporary Freud, Turning Points and Critical Issues”, has accompanied my journey as a student of psychoanalysis from its very beginning. I feel fortunate to contribute to it.
Psychoanalysts are sometimes asked to single out specific instances or experiences from their lives that played a seminal role in their choice of profession, or more specifically: in the formation of their analytic identity. Of course, the identity of every psychoanalyst is a product of cross-fertilization and grafting. It cannot be reduced to the analyst’s conscious appreciation of a particular theoretical paradigm. Some of us see a clear connection between their psychoanalytic work and their life histories. Few analysts would leave out their own personal or training analysis when reflecting on the development of their professional identities. Others would point to anacquaintance with an influential teacher or supervisor as the watershed in the evolution of their professional outlook. For yet other analysts, there is a mythological patient, a treatment that remains etched in memory as a turning point in the analyst’s self-perception as an analyst. There are also those for whom a particular text continues to resonate in their psychoanalytic language, still shaping how they think and work.
My reading of Freud’s works, the years I spent translating Freud and editing Hebrew editions of his writings, together with my research into the history of the dissemination of psychoanalysis outside the German cultural sphere during Freud’s lifetime- all these made a deep and salient impression on my personal psychoanalytic palimpsest.
Although reminiscent of the traditional Judaic method of the examination and exegesis of sacred texts with a study partner, reading and interpreting Freud has had far-reaching consequences for the evolution of the discipline and cannot be dismissed as purely scholastic. The tension between orthodoxy and heresy, between partisans and dissidents, informed both the writing of some of Freud’s canonical essays and the way in which his followers received them. Being a “Freudian analyst” thus means much more than following a young man’s journey from dissecting the gonads of eels to dissecting his own dreams, from the first topography to the second topography. It is not enough to understand Freud’s preference for the couch and technique of free association, or to accept the centrality of the psychosexual unconscious, the oedipal configuration, or even the dual theory of drives. Being a psychoanalyst means, I would argue, immersing oneself in the life journey and body of writing of a its founder and giving oneself over to its idiosyncrasies, its twists and turns. By following the workings of the mind of a single person struggling to give meaning to phenomena at once both familiar and unaccounted for, private and public, clinical and cultural, the analyst-to-be prepares herself for the task of following her own mind and the mind of her patients.
Freud seldom set to “write up” his ideas; he wrote in order to know what he was thinking about. As he worked in parallel on several essays at a time, Freud’s atelier resembled that of an artist, with several unfinished canvases stretched out next to each other, waiting for the muses and whims of the master to allow their completion. Ideas and dilemmas confronted while working on one essay were often caught in midair before reaching the (exceptionally large) sheet of paper, and their flow redirected into another unfinished text, where they settled into the company of other ideas. Some ideas were thus cut short and contained as miniatures within a relatively limited discursive frame, while others awaited their expression within an entirely new context. One occasionally has the feeling that a given text was suddenly hijacked by a train of thoughts that seemingly sprang out of an entirely different creative or theoretical impetus.
I think that Freud’s Moses, like no other text in his body of writing, demonstrates, both implicitly and explicitly, the unique creative process by which Freud let himself be surprised, indeed defeated, by the text as it evolved during the nearly 2 decades that passed from its inception to its publication. Truth is, that even after all the years of germination the publication of Moses was still bearing some of the marks of “induced labor”.
As I have tried to show in my chapter, it took a violent political act to make Freud overcome his doubts and save the Moses essay from further inhibitions and procrastination.
On April 11 1939 Max Eitingon wrote to Freud:
“There is something exceptionally symbolic in the fact that your book on Moses arrived here on the Passover holiday, about which the Haggadah relates that God took the Jews out of Egypt “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” [Eitingon wrote this phrase in the original Hebrew, but in German letters]. One can somehow sense the analogy in your book. Piercing logic, and a charm that cannot be withstood. That is how you bring the reader close to you in the final section, repeating for him the difficult arguments you make in Part II. It is a fine book”. (Eitingon to Freud, 11 April 1939, in Freud & Eitingon, 2004, p. 923).
Freud’s Moses book is as political as so many other texts, theoretical or clinical, he wrote. However, unlike other Freudian texts, from the moment of its publication, the Moses book has taken its readers – analysts and non-analysts alike – by surprise. It addresses the psychology of religion and biblical criticism. It is also a novel that rewrites a myth, a historical work on the emergence of the psychoanalytic idea, a monograph on the origin of neurosis in the individual and in society, as well as a political manifesto and a metaphorical biography. Noting all these elements in Moses and Monotheism, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1997) termed it a “daydream”. In my contribution to Larry Brown’s edited volume, I focused on the political and mental conditions that informed the reception of Freud’s Moses book in Jewish Palestine/Israel in the Inter-war era. I connect this reception with the Zionist endeavor with and the migration of German-speaking psychoanalysis following the Nazi rise to power and the establishment of a local psychoanalytic Society and discourse in this part of the world. A point could be made that the coming of Freud’s Moses to Jewish Palestine is the story of the meeting of one day-dream with another, a political daydream.
Thank you.