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

unpleasurable event. Instinctual renunciation can, however, also be imposed for other reasons, which we correctly describe as internal. Here it is in obedience to the super-ego, yielding pleasure as well as unpleasure. However what help doe this explanation of the satisfaction arising from instinctual renunciation give us towards understanding the processes that we want to study - the elevation of self-regard when there are advances in intellectuality? It can be said that the great man is the agency for whose sake the achievement is carried out, and in group psychology the role of the super-ego falls to him - i.e. to Moses in relation to the Jewish people. However this still yields very little information as to what has determined the character of the Jewish people, as the religion which began with the prohibition against making an image of God develops increasingly into a religion of instinctual renunciation, God becoming elevated to the idea of ethical perfection. Similarities can be seen with totemism, which has a number of command that are nothing other than instinctual renunciations; the worship of the totem, includes prohibition against killing it and exogamy and granting of equal rights to all the members of the fraternal alliance. These are the beginnings of moral and social order. Furthermore it seems that investigation of all the other cases of a sacred prohibition would lead to the same conclusion as in that of the horror of incest: that what is sacred was originally nothing other than the prolongation of the will of the primal father. Even the obligation of circumcision can be seen as a symbol of the castration which the primal father once inflicted upon his sons in the plenitude of his absolute power, acceptance of the symbol, thereby showing willingness to submit to the father's will.

E. What is True in Religion

How have these people been able to acquire a belief in a Divine Being, overwhelming 'reason and science'? The religion of Moses lead 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
(3) it forced upon the people an advance in intellectuality which important in itself, opened the way to the appreciation of intellectual work and to further renunciation of instinct. This did not happen at once, it took hundreds of years to imprint itself on to the people's character.

Thus the religion of Moses did not disappear without a trace in its latency. A kind of memory of it had survived, obscured and distorted, supported, perhaps among individual members by ancient records. This great past eventually regained power to transform the god Yahweh into the god of Moses. In the previous sections (C, D and E of Part I) Freud looks at the assumptions that are inevitable of such an achievement of tradition is to be comprehensible.

F. The Return of the Repressed

Here Freud returns to the ideas behind repression, both the remoteness of the period concerned and the mechanisms which lead to the formation of the neuroses - as a result of the experience, an instinctual demand arises which calls for satisfaction. The ego refuses that satisfaction, wither because it is paralysed by the magnitude of the demand (internal) or because it recognises it as a danger. On finding an alternative path for substitutive satisfaction, it becomes a symptom without the acquiescence or understanding of the ego. This return of the repressed shows many distortions to which it has been subjected as compared with the original. These ideas may bring us close to the problems of group psychology in the renunciation of the instinct.

G. Historical Truth

Having undertaken these psychological 'diversions' Freud argues that it is even more credible that the religion of Moses carried through its effect on the Jewish people as a tradition. In support of this Freud once more describes the move from polytheism to monotheism, its significance and uncertainties. He concludes though that Moses brought the people the idea of a single god, not as a novelty but a significant revival of an experience in the primaeval ages of the human family that had long vanished from men's conscious memory. However it had been and was so important that he proposes that it seems likely that is had left behind in the human mind some permanent traces, which can be compared to tradition.

H. The Historical Development

In this final section Freud returns to many of the issues that he has discussed in Totem and Taboo, most notably his finding that in a number of important relations our children react, not in a manner corresponding to their own experience, but instinctively, like the animals, in a manner that is only explicable as phylogenetic