Trauma by Bond Lucy; Craps Stef;

Author:Bond, Lucy; Craps, Stef;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

As we saw in Chapter 1, in Moses and Monotheism (1939; see 2010b) Freud conceptualized collective trauma in the image of an individual neurosis. Moses and Monotheism was not the first text in which he draws a parallel between individual and collective pathologies. In Totem and Taboo (1912), for example, Freud argues that ‘religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual … as a return of long forgotten important happenings in the primaeval history of the human family’ (2010b: 94). These claims are repeated and developed in his final work. Seeking a ‘deeper knowledge of the historical and psychological conditions of [the] origin [of the religion]’ (2010b: 96), Freud suggests that the roots of modern Judaism lie in a history that is characterized by ‘duality’ (2010b: 84) and rupture.

Freud begins his study by arguing that the Moses who led the Jews out of Egypt would not have been the son of Jewish slaves, as scripture suggests, but an Egyptian nobleman of high birth. From this claim it follows that the monotheistic tradition to which Moses and his followers subscribed would not have been that of the Hebrew god Jahve (or Yahweh), but Aton, an ancient Egyptian deity. Drawing on the work of the historian Ernst Sellin, Freud goes on to argue that, having freed the Jews and led the Exodus out of Egypt, the Egyptian Moses ‘met a violent end in a rebellion of his stubborn and refractory people. The religion he had instituted was at the same time abandoned’ (2010b: 59). Some two generations after his murder, in this story, Moses’s followers combined with worshippers of Jahve who had settled at Qadēs, an oasis in the desert. It was through the union of these tribes that the people of Israel were born; the stories of Moses and Jahve were integrated into a new doctrine, founded by a man who was also named Moses.

Freud argues that the memory of the first Moses was subsequently displaced by that of the second Moses. As their stories were conflated, the two Moses were transposed into a single figure who led the Jews out of Israel and founded a new religion in the oasis. Freud sees this rewriting of history as a process of traumatic erasure, motivated by collective regret over the murder of the first Moses, which was thereafter forgotten. Over time, however, the characteristics of Jahve, who was now the sole god of the Israelites, increasingly started to resemble those of ‘the old God of Moses, Aton’ (2010b: 103). Freud describes the process through which long-buried aspects of the past began to possess the present as an ‘incubation period’ akin to the ‘grave psychical and motor symptoms’ that a patient might suffer following a railway accident (2010b: 109). He notes that, ‘in spite of the fundamental difference in the two cases, the problem of the traumatic neuroses and that of Jewish Monotheism … there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature which one might term latency’ (2010b: 109–10).

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