The man Moses, the monotheistic religion and the man Freud

Abstract

The origin of the Jewish monotheistic religion is based, according to Freud, on the Egyptian origin of Moses and the failure of pharaoh Akhenaton’s attempt to lead the Egyptian people to monotheism. Moses is for Freud a disquieting figure; Freud identifies with Moses who leads the Jewish people to the promised land, and imposes on Jews the Mosaic distinction that, in line with Assmann, we define as the splitting between true and false in religion. The hypothesis of this work concerns the two “political” aspects of Freudian proposal: on the one hand, the disavowal of violence and the importance of impotence as the original dynamic of monotheism; on the other hand, the identification of the Jewish people with the “psychoanalytic people”.