Chapter 3. Moses His People and Monotheist Religion of Moses and Monotheism - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

superior high god. The next step then leads us to the theme with which we are here concerned - the return of a single father-god of unlimited dominion. How did this re-establishment of the primal father come about? It seems that a growing sense of guilt took hold of the Jewish people until one found the occasion for detaching a new - the Christian - religion from Judaism. Freud then looks at the way that Christ sacrificed himself without guilt, to redeem others from their guilt, and as Judaism is the religion of the father, Christianity became the religion of the son. Thus the poor Jewish people, if indeed Moses was a messiah and Jesus was a re-incarnation are doubly guilty of killing 'our god' and if not Christianity can represent a displacement of Jews worship in the same way that it was displaced after the killing of Moses.

E. Difficulties

This analogy Freud has drawn between neurotic processes and religious events seems strong, however in this transference from individual to group psychology two difficulties arise, differing in their nature and importance, which Freud now addresses.

Firstly, Freud acknowledges that he has only dealt with a single instance from a copious phenomenology of religions, due to limitations of knowledge and time etc. Secondly, we have the question of in what form the operative tradition in the life of peoples is present - a question which does not occur in individuals since there it is solved by the existence in the unconscious of memory-traces of the past.

Freud proposes that there is though, complete conformity in this respect between the individual and the group: in the group too, an impression of the past is retained in unconscious memory- traces. In the individual, what is forgotten, is not extinguished but only 'repressed'. This repressed retains its upward urge, its effort to force its way into consciousness, under three conditions:

(1) if the strength of the anticathexis is diminished by pathological processes which overtake the other part (of the mind) - the ego - or by a different distribution of the cathectic energies in the ego - is in the state of sleep.

(2) if the instinctual elements attaching to the repressed receive a special reinforcement (of which the best example is the processes during puberty).

(3) if at any time in recent experience impressions or experiences occur which resemble the repressed so closely that they are able to awaken it. The repressed is unconscious and counted as belonging to the id and is subject to the same mechanisms distinguished from it only in respect to its genesis.

The impressions of early traumas, from which we started out, are either not translated into the preconscious or are quickly put back by repression into the id condition. We can trace the vicissitudes so long as it is a question of what the subject has experienced himself, but complications arise when included are not only experiences but innate ideas, present at birth, with a phylogenetic origin - an archaic heritage. What does this consist of and what is the evidence for it?

It consists of characteristic dispositions of all living organisms, in their development, and reactions to particular impressions and stimuli. It represents the constitutional factor in the individual. An instance of archaic heritage would be that dating from the period at which language developed. Furthermore, and more importantly as Freud proposes, is the case of the behaviour of neurotic children towards their parents in the Oedipus and castration complex, which seems unjustified in the individual case and only intelligible phylogenetically - by their connection with the experience of earlier generations. So Freud suggests that in this way we see that the inheritance of memory-traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example, are established beyond question. In contrast, though, biological science refuses to hear of the inheritance of acquired characters by succeeding generations, but Freud is adamant that the survival of these memory traces in the archaic heritage, is resultant of biological evolution and serves an important role in bridging the gulf between individual and group psychology, we can deal with peoples as we do an individual neurotic. This proposal also brings humans much closer to animals, with respect to 'instinct' that allow one to behave in anew situation as though it were an old familiar one.