Moses, Monotheism, and Jewish counter-narrative in the auto/biographical writing of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud’s autobiographical writings come in many forms, from self-dream interpretations to highly personal prefaces, to private thoughts revealed in minor footnotes, to personal anecdotes in published lectures, and, perhaps most fascinatingly, in his works of biography. Several scholars have directly addressed Freud’s intimate and complex relationship with the biblical figure of Moses and his Moses and Monotheism (1939). The book can be rendered autobiographical from its very first lines, where Freud promptly places himself amongst his “Jewish brethren,” something he only occasionally did in his work or personal writings. Moses and Monotheism is also an intriguing text for its quality as a counter-narration, and for its blatant violation of observant Jews themselves, who were not impressed with Freud’s retelling of Moses and the historical development of the Jews. The book thus is both a counter-narrative in itself, and contains several counter-narratives, which call into question, not any general prescriptive norm of Freud’s world, but rather the entire Jewish world of Germany and Austria, which at that time was already under monstrous attack. This lecture explores these various counter-narratives and proposes that, via his autobiographical anecdotes, primarily but not exclusively found in Moses and Monotheism, Freud emerges as a self-constructed Jewish pariah amongst the Jews, caught up in his own authorial complex of the explicitly Jewish father rewriting the history of his own people, in the uneasy presence of his own people. Finally, this lecture takes note of the complexities of Jewish counter-narratives within and against the Jewish world itself.