Tag Archives: Moses and Monotheism

Anne Baxter in DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”: “Moses…Moses.”

I just finished Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for about the third or fourth time in my life. At times it is like cracking walnuts in your mouth; it is the kind of book that tells you how uninformed you are are about most things, including yourself; of course, that is the part of us we know the least. The skinny on the book is that considering it was written about 72 years ago –it was published in 1939, Freud having published sections earlier — is that the archaeological and sociological information Freud drew upon is no longer valid as good science. However, it is a fabulous psychoanalytic ride. Even with my background, there are paragraphs beyond my brainpan’s capacity to fathom, or else I am drawing very old and my cerebrum has puckered here and there. Instinctual renunciation, return of the repressed, latency, obsessional neurosis are but a few of the concepts Freud delves into with the hand of the master trying to express what is second nature to him but conceptually difficult to us mere students. It is a most challenging book but worth each page. You don’t read Freud, you examine each sentence as if part of the Talmud.

Essentially he writes in his last years in a comprehensive way about how behaviors in each of us can be applied to the species collectively. He applies his psychoanalytic processes to society at large and it is fascinating to observe how a significant amount of what he shares does seem applicable if not basically true. I am always injudicious with my “idol,” giving him a wide berth to do his thing, enjoying how he messes with our minds. I root for Siggy. I was trained in analytic psychotherapy but my personality was ill-equipped to deal with or master the Newtonian concepts of Freud, the 19th century model of how energy, drive (instinct), and cathexis (attachment) work. I moved more into an expressive and interpersonal way of dealing with clients; however, the training was in analytic thinking and that has proven very worthwhile. In fact, centuries hence Freud might be remembered more for his critique and observation(s) about mankind as a whole, and  perhaps being honored more as a philosopher than a healer. Indeed, most of his cases were not successful. Like or dislike him, like Darwin, he will not go away. His Moses book guts religion, Judaism and Christianity, for what it is– illusion. Man needs his myths, his gods, for he is damaged in that way. Freud thought that a man or woman were not fully developed or matured until they had given up the obsessional neurosis of a god in the sky (see his The Future of an Illusion).

I am  psychologically free in ways I can not even describe as an atheist. The believers of late smack their smarmy lips as they go on to prattle about how poor Christopher Hitchens will now see their reality. Garbage in, garbage out!

Buy it or don’t buy it, Freud occasionally stops to patiently inform the reader, urging him to go along for a while with his suppositions and hypotheticals and before you know it he has surrounded you with his wagons. He posits, to wit, that there were two Moses’ and that one was murdered by the early tribes under his control; he argues that this primordial deed was repressed, an unconscious act, for suppression is a conscious choice; that centuries later that which was denied returned, much as each of us for several years after age five or so experience a latency period which later erupts as we move into our adolescence. In short, sexual features and feelings are repressed and reemerge years later. So an analytic concept long verified by therapists with clients and over the decades is applied to an entire Jewish people’s traditional history. It works. And if it does not work, at least you begin to fathom an important analytic concept or two about each one of us. Freud’s ability to apply individual behavior to the species at large is most telling, instructive and makes you think in global terms.

In the last few weeks or months, I can not say, I have had reminiscences about the years before I was ten, places I played in, streets I rode my bike on, early childhood chums, neighborhoods I prowled about, very dim and early relationships with young people who came and went, flitted about me and then were gone — in one case, a young girl I played with and then I realized she had moved away. Some of these memories can not be confirmed by the person who experienced them. I am simply not sure they were events. I am sure that my level of awareness was dim as I could not survey all about me in ways that ended in conclusions or observations, as if I was some primordial sea creature swimming onto the beach, looking about, sensing, but not realizing or seeing in a profound way. I could not explain my world. I was in it but not fully aware. I mildly experienced who I was. I take that back. I did not experience myself. I only sensed, as if I was being jabbed by the needles of everyday occurrences. You understand, don’t you? Think back.

When Kane on his deathbed says “Rosebud,” I can grasp that so much better now at this age. The sled had so much meaning for him, condensed meaning — the time in which he enjoyed his sled, the time in which he is sold by his mother; his ineffective father and the capitalistic banker Thatcher, all conspiring to bring about a personal abandonment he would he feel all his life. In one of the most often misheard lines in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander mentions her mother and Kane responds in so many words, sotto voce, that he knows about mothers. I gag when I write that, for I remembr seeing the movie as a young child, all alone in the local theater, and I wonder today if I was not touched by my own feelings of being abandoned on levels I could not possibly articulate but that I felt. I must have incorporated the lonelinesss and the abandonment of Kane for there were such feelings, I hesitate here, in my own family, especially from my mother. In all my childhood my mother never read a fairy tale to me, any book at all. A puzzlement. Why? That is the rub, and the “enchantment” about the memory.

And so of late I am reflecting and trying to re-empathize with a host of significant memories, trying to string them on a necklace of affect and effect. I am imagining and reimagining the meanings they have for me, for it is an old cliche that as we near our end we turn back to our beginnings — what observation might Freud interject here! And so of late I have come up with a few sentences that might begin my very next book.

I was fucking abandoned when born. So what! And who cares? I am unfinished man…Dive Delve Descend.

And a happy Hanukah to my brethren.

Thinking

I’ve put Freud away for a while — Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism , his trilogy swan song at the end of his life, but not for too long. In their place I am rounding up the cattle in my new work, trying to incorporate major changes, which are always difficult, you know, spreading the width between paragraphs to inset new revisions as if a dentist asking to say open wide; it is my recalcitrance to revise with new material or better material, when I feel it is all over with. I may have about 20 or more stories, all new, all untried; however,”Archipelago,” was reviewed by David Herrle, editor of Subtle Tea, to his pleasure, so I feel I still have the chops. Probably by mid March I will hustle up the dough to send it out for publication by Wheatmark, my self-publisher. Jordan will do the cover and I will have completed my  third book in five years; after that, I haven’t the slightest notion of what I will write, not even glimmers on the horizon. I have a plethora of short essays that are very good but who reads books of essays any longer; for me to publish such a collection would truly be vanity publishing. I may go back to science fiction fantasy, or I may try my hand on a kind of Siddharha variation in which I spew “wisdom.” I may buddha myself.

The i Tetralogy is now in my hands with its spanking new white cover with a profile of a German officer on it which my son designed to the pleasure of the publisher editorial staff and to father freese. It is terrific. All white and sparkling severe. Jane and I have worked on the publicity release for the book which has been edited again, a preface deleted and endorsements now included. Working over several months I have come up with my own database which is over 4,000 e-mail addresses here in the the U.S. and overseas. I expect about 1,000 to kickback dead and perhaps maybe 20-30 possible purchases to be made. I am resigned to the book’s fate; I am pleased that it is my own statement of indignation about the Holocaust. I live not for posterity; I live for now and for what pleasures I rake in from what creativity I can muster for kith and kin. The second book, “Working Through the Holocaust,” will build on the same database, I hope. The ironic fact, but not dispiriting to me, is that I cannot give the book away, although I and others consider it a powerful novel. In a very grandiose way I’m in the company of Whitman, Thoreau and a host of others who had to invest in themselves for publication and who sold few copies;  Freud only sold 300 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
What is criticial for me, what is dead on crucial, is that I write as best as I can and to remove myself from the fray. In fact, the fray doesn’t know me, nor does it need me. In this remarkably decadent culture in which lines wait in the rain for the ghost-written effort of Sarah Palin, in which fewer than 10 people were at the tacky funeral of Orson Welles, the writer-artist must be more than brave — he should revel in that he is not corrupted. Sam Goldwyn once offered Freud a sum for a script to be made in Hollywood; Freud’s answer was brief and direct — a stoic’s response. No, I won’t share what he said. After all, why buy into publishing for the all, the rest, for them, as opposed for writing for oneself in an attempt, admittedly useless, to adumbrate the major themes of one’s life, to lay bare the skeletal anatomy of one’s experience on this species-sad planet. Recent visits to my doctor have made clear that incipient threats to my well-being are active and waiting and my rush to dissect who I am is my defense against the dimming of the light. I write not an awful lot, but what I do I write with the feverish attempt to do as much as I can, mortal soul that I am, before the scythe cuts through my navel.

As I struggle within this mortal coil, beset with new health concerns, anxieties, fears, much the same, worries, I persevere, for I only feel alive when I write and when I make love, both libidinous intensities which are up there with wonderful vistas, perfumes, breezes off the sea and pleasures of being a father. I doubt I will have grandchildren which has never been a concern; I have a son and a daughter and that is all that matters, having lost one daughter, Caryn, at 34, by her own hand. I grab for the testicles of living, I squeeze the orange until the pips squeak. I struggle with age-old neuroses which are the shadows of one’s self, and hopefully dwarfed in later years by my shrinking size. Serenity is not in my future; who wants serenity? I don’t. I like pauses. Stays at oases. Give me existential acts — life spurts, life spasms in which I define myself rather than mystical curlicues wafting up my ass. I am always better in mind than I am in fact. And that is why I write, I think: To excel in my own living, to record the experiences and then to be done with them.

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