Moses of Vienna

...In 1895, struggling one last time to locate the unconscious in the pathways of the brain, he urged a friend to “not refrain from publishing even conjectures...

...But Freud had always indulged in the non-empirical as well...

...Freud’s Moses, unlike the archetypal leader, lives with confl ict and anxiety, and he does so in the interests of civilization...

...Twenty years later, Freud was still asking himself that question...

...In 1914, on a visit to Rome, Freud found himself unable to stop contemplating Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses and, characteristically, he struggled to articulate why on paper...

...Because Moses possessed the power of abstraction, he could control his inner turmoil––and become a new kind of authority fi gure...

...Now, in the fi nal year of his life, he published a book that, as Edmundson writes, “was as bold and speculative a piece of work as he had ever attempted...

...Moses and Monotheism would serve as Freud’s last will and testament for psychoanalysis on a metaphorical level...

...But he never abandoned the assumption that advances in neurophysiology would validate psychoanalytic fi ndings, and so after completing Moses and Monotheism he began work on a new book, asserting to the end that “the phenomena with which we were dealing do not belong to psychology alone...

...Moses was no Hamlet...

...In Freud’s reimagining of Exodus, the signifi cance of Moses’ monotheism was not just the idea of one God but the idea of an invisible God...

...An Outline of Psycho-Analysis would serve as his last will and testament for psychoanalysis on an empirical level...

...Wells, prominent scientists from the Royal Society, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, whose Hogarth Press published Freud in English...

...The application of the political lessons of Group Psychology, however, he leaves implicit, though unmistakable...

...Yet what allowed Moses to keep his rage in check––at least in Freud’s radical 1938 elaboration on his already radical 1914 interpretation of what Michelangelo might have been trying to portray––was that he himself hadn’t abandoned the cultural, intellectual step forward...

...The intellectual capacity to believe in an “abstract idea” rather than a “sensory perception” was, in Freud’s words, “a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality...

...Because of the value of abstraction to civilization in general, and the value of sublimation in a leader in particular, Edmundson contends, “There is no social ceremony more antithetical to Judaic and psychoanalytical inwardness than the mass rally...

...Which brings Freud back to a favorite subject: Moses...

...Edmundson’s objective, however, isn’t merely to summarize Moses and Monotheism...

...Why would Moses––a man who was sure that his vision of a God in the sky was the one true vision––simply sit and glower...

...No storm-tossed ship of state needs a Hamlet at the helm...

...The sense of anxiety departs and we feel free...

...Freud, however, thought he lacked that courage...

...I take no pride in having avoided speculation,” he wrote 10 years later...

...What Freud saw in the Moses of Michelangelo in 1914 was himself, even if he didn’t consciously make the connection for another 20 years...

...Suddenly we are not at war within ourselves...

...Only 10 years after that, in 1915, his immediately post-“Moses of Michelangelo” period, did he concede the speculative origins of the unconscious: “A gain in meaning is a perfectly justifi able ground for going beyond the limits of direct experience...

...as well as Towards Reading Freud, and the introduction to Richard Panek is the author of The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes...

...Adam Phillips’s reissue of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Edmundson takes Freud’s ideas on their own philosophically provocative, artistically demanding, terms...

...they have an organic and biological side as well...

...During the 1880s he was one of the more prominent neuroanatomists in Vienna, fi rst as a researcher, then both in private practice and as the director of a neurological institute...

...Moses is fl esh of sublimation,” Freud said to Salvador Dal?, one of the notables who called on him at his Maresfi eld Gardens home in London...

...One cannot do without people who have the courage to think new things before they are in a position to demonstrate them...

...This was the model of authority that Freud tried to emulate, certainly in his private practice, but also in his writing...

...But the sense of wholeness, the feeling of freedom, are illusions...

...When “the world seems most disordered, incoherent, and inconsistent, and when humanity seems to be drowning in its own confusion,” he writes, we want a leader who seems “to have perfect confi dence, to need no one, and to be entirely self-suffi cient”––who exudes “a sense of being whole...

...In 1927, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud examined how this mass “addiction to the patriarch” manifests itself in religion...

...Freud treated Hamlet almost as if he were a patient (in The Interpretation of Dreams...

...And it would allow the kind of introspection that would become the basis of psychoanalysis: “belief in that internal, unseen structure that Freud calls the psyche...

...BY RICHARD PANEK The story goes that when the Nazis raided Berggasse 19 in Vienna in March 1938, they were helping themselves to the contents of the family safe when there appeared from the back of the apartment an old, ill, bearded specter, more wraith than man...

...In 1921, Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, a meditation on mass worship of political authority––in particular, as Edmundson writes, “the man with the masterly aura,” the leader who “is always sure that his vision is the one true vision...

...It is the gaze, Edmundson argues, that we should all level at our leaders...

...By the time the Nazis invaded Austria, Freud had completed the fi rst two chapters of the manuscript that would become Moses and Monotheism...

...Why not...

...Edmundson doesn’t push the comparison any further, and he never descends to the kind of pop psychoanalysis that a further comparison would require...

...But as he did with Hitler and Freud, Edmundson underscores similarities in situations and personalities that speak to mass adulation of a certain type of authority...

...Freud knew Hamlet...

...To Freud, Edmundson adds, “God is still a fi gure to displace, but belief in him is a necessary stage on the way to a far better belief...

...In his essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” Freud argued that the sculpture captures Moses at the moment he discovers his followers worshipping the golden calf...

...It would lead to “the true development of the mind...

...His conclusion about Freud’s fascination with authoritarian fi gures is, like much of this book, both simple and profound: Takes one to know one...

...While Edmundson doesn’t dwell on the scientifi c aspect of Freud’s background––understandably, for the purposes of this book––Freud did...

...Moses won’t let go of my imagination,” Freud wrote a friend in 1935...

...Others included H.G...

...The anecdote might be apocryphal, but it endures because it’s emblematic of Freud’s relationship to authoritarian fi gures in general: He saw right through them...

...Anyone who had been reading Freud,” Edmundson writes, “would not have been terribly surprised by the events of March 1938...

...Chronologically the book covers the period between March 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria and Freud reluctantly agreed to fl ee Vienna for London, and September 1939, the start of World War II and the death of Sigmund Freud...

...and a Freud who repeatedly demonstrated, in Edmundson’s own words, “that there was nothing that crossed his mind that he would not write down and publish...

...Freud affi rms not inner peace but inner confl ict,” Edmundson says...

...Like the dictator,” Edmundson paraphrases Freud, “the sky god introduces clarity into situations that are overcomplicated...

...One of two intellectual last wills and testaments, actually...

...He carried the manuscript with him when he fl ed Vienna, and he continued working on it in London, in a race against the cancer that was devouring his face...

...What Freud would have seen in Hitler is the subject of Mark Edmundson’s The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days...

...This is so not because the tensions are enjoyable in themselves–– they are not––but because the alternatives are so much worse...

...Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Read...

...Like Freud’s, his concerns are cultural...

...Only later, in the mid-1890s, when he found that he couldn’t account for some psychical phenomena through cause-and-effect neurological processes, did he decisively abandon the study of the brain for the study of the mind...

...In the twenty-fi rst century a stranglingly intolerant version of faith is abroad not only throughout the Islamic world, but in the United States of America,” which “has a sizable constituency who wish for little so much as religious rule by the state, theocracy...

...The application of the religious lessons of The Future of an Illusion to today Edmundson makes explicit...

...It is from this “ability to sublimate” that Moses not only masters his emotions but “gains his authority as a leader,” Edmundson writes...

...In this interpretation, the spectacle that awaited Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai––the Israelites worshipping the golden calf––was more than a rejection of monotheism...

...It would be essential for developments “in mathematics, in law, in science, and in literary art––in all the activities, in other words, that involve making an abstract model of experience, in words or numbers or lines, and working with the abstraction to achieve control over nature or to bring humane order to life...

...Edmundson writes, “What Moses surely suggests to Freud––and should suggest to us––is that it may be possible to be an authority, to have an infl uence, without being a conventional patriarch...

...He believes that the inner tensions we experience within the psyche are by and large necessary tensions...

...Sigmund Freud gave them a stare that only he could give, and the thugs took the money and ran...

...Yet in Freud’s interpretation, as Edmundson says, “Moses never throws down the tablets in rage...

...The book would serve, Edmundson writes, as “something like an intellectual last will and testament for Freud, and for psychoanalysis...

...He continued working on the fi nal chapter while waiting for news of whether his bribes were suffi cient to guarantee his family safe passage out of the country...

...The gaze that Moses leveled at the Israelites is the gaze that Freud leveled at the Nazi looters...

...It also represented a cultural, intellectual step backward...

...But it is a gaze that is available only to someone who has looked through himself to see the worshipper–– and the looter––within...

...He was, Edmundson concludes, “the great cultural patriarch, who stood for nothing so much as for the dismantling of patriarchy...

...Psychologically it parallels two personalities: a Hitler who wouldn’t shut up, declaring himself an expert on a subject and then talking about it for hours, as Edmundson writes (quoting Don DeLillo) in “endless monologues, free associating...

...Not that he pushes the comparison between political leaders then and now...