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An Egyptian Moses? Freud’s Theory of Dream-Work as a Model for Jewishness

Sun, December 16, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 1

Abstract

In his only, full-length book on Judaism, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM, Sigmund Freud famously claims that Moses was an Egyptian and the ancient Israelites murdered him. The assertion is not entirely novel, as Freud was neither the first nor the last thinker to locate in ancient Egypt the origins of monotheism. What is unique about his contribution to the imagination of the Biblical hero, however, is that Freud constructs an entire theory of Jewishness on the basis of the memory-traces of an Egyptian Moses. In his book, FREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN, Edward Said thus sees Freud’s work not only as a meditation on the problematic of identity itself but also as a theory of Jewishness based on the internalization of the non-European “other.” Freud’s Egyptian Moses, then, points to a theory of Jewishness that is neither exclusionary nor self-same and instead open to otherness.
Building on Said’s attention to Freud’s theory of Jewishness, I argue that Freud’s imagination of ancient Egypt does not merely condition his thought on the character of Moses or Jewish identity but also many of the key concepts of psychoanalysis, including most importantly, his theory of dream-work. In her article, “Freud’s Uncanny Egypt,” Mary Bergstein astutely captures the many ways in which ancient Egypt traverses Freud’s “historical and visual imagination” as an “uncanny other.” Bergstein’s work is useful because she demonstrates how the figure of ancient Egypt permeates much of Freud’s thought, from his earliest childhood dreams to his mature reconstruction of the Biblical narrative. In this paper, I take Said’s and Bergstein’s insights one step further and claim that Freud’s theories of dream-work are the site PAR EXCELLENCE of his imaginative encounter with ancient Egypt. I also argue that dream-work serves as a model of Jewishness in Freud’s MOSES AND MONOTHEISM. In other words, Jewishness, in Freud’s thought, can be understood as a kind of “dream-work” caught up with the imagination of a non-European past. Plastic, mobile, and mixed, Egyptian and Hebrew, modern and ancient, Freud’s theory of Jewishness is similar to the “work” of dreams and a unique contribution to modern Jewish thought.

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