Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

feature of the work of Eigen who ‘drawing on his own study of Judaism and Kabbalah,
described psychoanalysis as a form of prayer’ (Aron 2004: 450). 273
An area little explored is the monotheistic imperative in Freud’s work, as a secular
monotheism, where Freud in the guise of Moses, becomes the revealer of the psychical law
that governs all human action. 274 Yerushalmi concludes his work with a personal letter to
Freud.
To you, Professor Freud, I confess to a thought that I have withheld all along
because I cannot substantiate it. I have tried to understand your Moses within its
stated framework of the history of religion, of Judaism, and of Jewish identity
without reading it as an allegory of psychoanalysis … But I carry within me a pentup
feeling, an intuition, that you yourself implied something more, something that
you felt deeply but would never dare to say. So I will take the risk of saying it. I
think that in your innermost heart you believed that psychoanalysis is itself a further,
if not final, metamorphosed extension of Judaism, divested of its illusory religious
forms but retaining its essential monotheistic characteristics, at least as you
understood and described them. In short, I think you believed that just as you are a
godless Jew, psychoanalysis is a godless Judaism (Yerushalmi 1991: 99).
This is most clearly expressed in Freud’s choosing of the representative deities that
consumed his working space, physically and psychically (Gamwell and Wells 1989;
Yerushalmi 1991; Burke 2006). 275 This area has been partially addressed by a renewed
examination of Moses and Monotheism that establishes a new truth-seeking dialogue that is
273 Farhi provides a clinical account of working with a patient that included utlizing the kabbalah as a form of
mutual engagement in her inner world (Farhi 2008).
274 Schwarz offers a postmodern view of ‘Freud’s God’ writing, ‘Freud concluded his life’s work by rewriting
psychoanalysis as religious myth. And Moses and Monotheism was the final instalment in Freud’s Bible …
Simply put, in Moses and Monotheism Freud does not psychoanalyse the Bible, he rewrites it … he comes to
see our psychic life as having its very source in religion … the Egyptian god, the first monotheistic deity, was
not a god of one people, but a universal god – “a single goal to embraces the whole world, one as all-loving as
he is all-powerful, who averse [sic.] to all ceremonial and magic, set for humanity as its highest aim a life of
truth and justice.” [Moses and Monotheism p. 61] This is the God that Freud the persecuted Jew longed for,
wishing that this deity of justice would be everyone's ancestor so justice could reign’ (Schwartz 1998: 291f.).
275 The cover of Yerushalmi’s book is taken from Rembrandt’s Moses breaks the tablets of the Law (1659).
Freud had an engraving by Kruger (1770) based on this picture in his collection of antiquities and is
reproduced in the book itself (Yerushalmi 1991: 83). This engraving is hung in the hall of the Freud Museum,
London. Martin explores Freud’s clinical use of these sculptures (Martin 2008).
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