Language’s navel in Freud’s Moses

Abstract

The article begins by presenting the collection of Die Antike, found in Freud’s library in London. By examining the contents of some articles by Werner Jaeger, the famous classicist author of Paideia, and at the same time contrasting his ideas with those of Freud’s Moses, one can perceive the position that the two authors took during the political upheavals in the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Questions about historical construction, temporality, language and political ideologies are addressed. With this, Moses and Monotheism emerges as a deeply political text, linked to a psychoanalytic social structure different from that proposed in Totem and Taboo.