FREUD surveyed

In this series you can also find:

Akhnaton, Moses, Oedipus, Triple Hermes, Freud, Lacan, Velikovsky, Osman, Theaux.

Freud and Schreber
Freud and Akhnaton-Moses
With Oedipus missing
With Missing Oedipus

Conclusions
Post-Scriptum (about Oedipus)

A SURVEY OF FREUD

regarding Akhnaton-Moses-Oedipus identification

Freud and Schreber's solar delirium

Freud, the 'first' so-called 'psychoanalyst' in the 20th century, assumed that his analysis of the soul (the early name for Psychoanalysis) should rely heavily upon deciphering the Unconscious Language (Lingusitic, Talking Cure) wherein any individual would speak - and in so doing, memory & History could be recovered.
This method leaned against a dismantlement of hypnosis, while the remaining illusions of this hypnosis were pushed back into a Collective Knowledge - which was thus awaiting to be renewed at its turn. In other words, while human psyche is analyzed, the remaining illusions of its alienation, are related to what becomes a human Collective Knowledge (collective repression etc...).

With his project, Freud came across a first analysis, known as President Shreber's (from a German lawyer's memoirs of hallucinations, which depicted his paranoid relationship with the sun/God).
As Velikovsky noticed forty years later, Shreber's words were very much like those of another intriguing character, the pharaoh named Akhnaton, who was also depicted by several Egyptologists as either delirious, perverted, or hormonally unbalanced (a noticeable case indeed, for many other Egyptologists depicted him as one of their major figures, First Individual in Human History). There are practically no indications that Freud himself had picked up the similarity between Shreber's and Akhnaton's words and philosophy. And yet, remarkably, after Shreber's analysis, he began to get interested in the mystery of Akhnaton.

Although unconsciously, in his move/displacement from Shreber to Akhnaton, Freud, in 1920, had covered the distance which lays between Individual and Collective Psychology. The reason why he felt that something was missing in the realization of his Psychoanalysis, may be due to his incomplete awareness, and also because he failed to notice several other connections between his observations.

For instance, he also neglected and perhaps repressed, a second relative correlation that is now acknowledgeable. The similarity between the pharaoh Akhnaton and the supposedly legendary Oedipus. was shown in 1960 by Velikovsky, but it was already announced and tackled, in 1920, by Freud's disciple Karl Abraham.
Freud disregarded this while he began to write a book wherein he preferred to look at the sole connection between Akhnaton and the Hebrew prophet, Moses.

Freud and Akhnaton-Moses

Freud was guessing that Moses had been an Egyptian disciple of the pharaoh Akhnaton, and that he worshipped this new religion because it was contemporaneous within his lifetime, and also because of their philosophical correlations. In 1920, Egyptology was not ready to show that Akhnaton was probably Hebrew, through his mother's lineage  - and by an ironic reversal, Freud felt that he had to see Moses as an 'Egyptian'.
Another mistake was even more serious; Freud apparently failed to notice the possibility that the so-called Moses could have been the pharaoh himself, instead of his courtier.

Obviously Freud resisted  to unify, in one single person, the three characters - Akhnaton, Moses, Oedipus - who fascinated him, each one separately; and as it happens regularly during a psychoanalytic inquiry, such a resistance eventually proves what it denies.

If we simply look to the fact, it is flagrant that Akhnaton mysteriously disappeared from Egypt. His policy was thwarted and his life threatened; the most logical behavior in his case was to leave (the study shows that Akhnaton had this possibility, for he was already separated from Thebes).
It drastically simplifies Freud's identification of Moses, especially since it no longer contradicts the Biblical report (Re: Akhnaton Hebrew by his mother). It also simplifies a persisting riddle of civilization, as with little doubt, the behavior of Akhnaton (Re: Oedipus Complex) was at the beginning of a fundamental disclosure in Collective Psychology.

In spite of these procrastinations, Freud made such a large advancement that a 'second' Psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, could compare Freud's first approach with the Copernician step.

Continuing to ignore Karl Abraham's observations, Freud, from 1920 up to 1939, gradually wrote the book about Moses the man, who could have been a disciple of Akhnaton.

With Oedipus missing

Freud's conclusion was not only about a racial and/or the national identity of the prophet Moses. For, in putting aside the fact that he did not look closely at the Oedipian psychology of Moses, he misunderstood a third dimension which was even more important. He attempted to demonstrate that Moses' disappearance (traditionally kept secret by the rabbinical mission) meant that he had been murdered by the Hebrew people (preceding the other alleged murder of Jesus Christ).

With a complex use of a stand-in (his scenario required that one of the murderers played an heroic semblance afterwards), Freud assumed to uncover a common and historical law of the Murder of the Father (and/or the leader) in the foundation of a civilization. Freud's theory, in introducing a Collective Psychology, was certainly the most painful and worrisome aspect of his analysis.

Today, we know how poorly documented was his hypothesis. Even if some advanced Egyptologists, as A.Osman, follow Freud's suggestion about a murder in the Sinai, neither Freud or Osman related the case to Oedipus' story. This omission indicates a severe flaw in their perspective, especially since Oedipus at Colonus indicates a secret (rabbis' mission) that protected him, predicts a false report (freudian interpretation) of his death and affirms the escape (confirmed by logical conclusion) of the ancient king of Thebes.

Freud's research had been hampered and obscured by a series of repressions - for instance, his toxicomania (cocaine, tobacco, morphine), his limitation in biology (regarding the Unconscious as Ecosystem), as well as his mistake about the function of the sexual organ (that his disciple W.Reich stigmatized - & I interpreted/corrected [see in French Bibliography La Function of the Organ (in D'AMOA a LESTRE) & in English Bibliography, the lecture given in New Zealand, From the Embryo to the Homunculus] ).
On the topic of  Moses-Akhnaton, Freud attempted to scuttle the triple identification that he had begun to disclose. Instead of revealing the survival of the Aton/Amarnian project, he schemed an explanation (murder of Moses) which made him accomplice (at first sight) with the political project of Akhnaton's ennemies and successors when they wanted to stop all possible ideas of expansion with Akhnaton's Promethean policy  .

It is worthwhile today, to revisit Freud's central claim regarding the idea of a murder as founding civilization. It looks too much like melancholia - and may warn us against a despairing attitude during apocalyptic times :
Since Science probably assigns to the 21st century the task to redefining the historical foundation of our civilization, it would be our present task to relate the counterpart of a fantasm of generic murder, with the omission of the Oedipus identity in Akhnaton's composite figure. We shall then be able to see that another challenge is awaiting - for, once Oedipus is remembered, perhaps we will also forget something again . . :

With Missing Oedipus

We can examine the second phase of the Western Identification with the esoterist's eyes, while looking at the Western Heroic Initiation . It looks like this Initiation leads towards an 'Oedipus' model. It is the second opportunity for the Resistance; when Oedipus misses something. In this option, Oedipus claims/thinks that he has failed his initiation  .
Freud did not identify this model - out of reality, his Oedipus was a dream  where he presented the murder of the father. In a way of miroring the Oedipus page, where I had something to say before adding a post-scriptum, - I shall, hereby, first close the article on the political face of the 20th century; before adding the domain of Oedipus\Orpheus, where psychoanalysis differs from philosophy.

Conclusions

Beyond the seductive complex of misinterpretations, which borders any path of knowledge in progress, one can find a real - one could say an hyper-real - aim, which has been driving a century of psychoanalysis. This prospect is evoked in Freud's two/three last books (The Future of an Illusion & Civilization and its Discontentment - plus Moses and Monotheism, which was an earlier book, begun in 1920 and completed in 1938).

In those two books, Freud claimed that the understanding of Collective Psychology was so important that one should renounce practicing any form of psychoanalysis as long as the abyss, which divides individual and collective psychology, was not bridged. No need to mention the function of his disciples who neglected his advice - suffice to remember that a technique is requested for a practical approach in the collective field, if psychoanalysis is worth continuing. This is what PLural ANalysis provides. I describe it on the WWW and through videos and his books ; as a matter of fact, it has assisted the overall acknowledgment, HAMOO, of the Primal Scene within the context of its civilization.

Post Scriptum about Oedipus  :

With Freud's first resistance in acknowledging Oedipus, the 20th century has attempted to identify Oedipus as 'the philosopher'  . This is resistance to seeing the king (Akhnaton) as a politician. It is also more concrete on Freud's fantasm : Freud dreams of the death of the father while he sleeps with his mother, the philosopher dreams of his own death and denies the need of Mother Earth (e.g. psychoanalysis, aka Ecology)

Oedipus' analysis by Freud has shown a deceiving Death Wish, functioning as the alibi for the meaning of (son;mother) Incest  . While naming the copula which identifies the predicate (the country, the mother-tongue) with the subject, the resulting Being faces his definition and/or his extinction.

In the socio-familial outfit, this is manifest when the enjoyment of the (m)other is acknowledged, and the idea of sacrifice is acquired (while in mankind the Name of the Father is supplied for the requested name of naming  ). Freud expresses the refusal of this experience.
In claiming that Moses has been killed on the Sinai, he meant that the Father had been murdered, before the sacrificial incest of Oedipus could occur. This is the primary and most radical rejection of the linguistic aporia of the copulation. Moreover, as much as Galileo's Earth was an objective fact, Oedipus does represent Akhnaton - thus imposing a second negotiation on the reason; and this is the Lacanian episode of Psychoanalysis  .

NOTE (1) : A well aware reader would notice the typical ambibuity of the symptom in Freud's Resistance - for we must acknowledge that Freud scuttled his disclosure inasmuch as he was missing the 'Akhnaton=Hebrew' piece (still unrevealed at his time). It is also noticeable that in missing the strict identity of Akhnaton=Moses, he was avoiding the sinister possibility of the murder of Akhnaton. Freud's resistance was thus a compromise against the worst possibiity (murder of  Prometheus) and an exigence for truth. So the very aware reader will be able to recognize the similarity with the situation at the Renaissance, when Ficinus' identification of Hermes Trismegistus(=Moses) was lacking of documentation and could not extend the recognition up to Orpheus - thus the Triplex=Moses was too weak for building the triple process of identification  and, as a matter of fact, opened to the worst criticism against Christianity (G.Bruno, when he called for a return to the Egyptian archaic religion). In this condition the Vatican had to scuttle the Renaissance and terminate Hermeticism with the Inquisition .

NOTE of the PS - A TECHNICAL POINT : a predicate is a verb, such as a form of be or see, that identifies the predicate of a sentence with the subject. It is also called linking verb. Therefore, in "I am the king", the naming of the predicate (the verb to be into being) results in "being, the country," where the subject has vanished and the definition is given by the country .

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© William Theaux 1949-1999