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about, Freud's Acherontic "insight" failed at first to impress either
the world out of which he was trying to escape, or the one to which
he aspired. The handful of reviews his book got responded to it
condescendingly, lumping it with old-fashioned "Dream Books" for
the ignorant and the superstitious; and it sold during the first two
years after publication some three hundred fifty copies, scarcely any
in the next five. But this is hardly to be wondered at; since to Jew
and Gentile alike, Freud was proposing a radically new myth of the
relation of sons to fathers, of the present to the past: a myth whose
inversion of the Joseph legend never occurred to him in those terms
at all. What is involved is not merely the flight from Hebrew mythol–
ogy in general, which we noticed in regard to the epigraph and
Foreword to
The Interpretation of Dreams,
but something much
more particular.
After all, one figure out of the Old Testament did come eventu–
ally to possess the imagination of Freud and to occupy him on the
level of full consciousness : the figure of Moses, whose very name- as
Freud carefully points out-means in Egyptian "Son," with the
patronymic suppressed; and whose own fleshly father, Amram, plays
no part in his myth, is not even named at the center of the tale.
Surely Freud loved Moses because he would brook no father at all,
Hebrew or Egyptian or Midianite, killing the surrogate for the Egyp–
tian King who had fostered him, running off from Jethro, the father
of the
shiksah
he had married- and, most reluctant of Jews, refusing
to have his own son circumcized until the Angel of the Lord (so
runs the apocryphal extension of the story) had swallowed him from
his head down to his testicles. Joseph, however, Freud does not ever
mention; though as an old, old man he wrote once, to his own
son naturally : "I sometimes compare myself to the old Jacob whom
in his old age his children brought to Egypt...." (And not even
this time did he pause to note that in becoming "Jacob," he was be–
coming his own father.)
In his great pioneering work, however, it is neither Jacob nor
Joseph nor Moses himself whom Freud evokes, but a mythological
goy,
two mythological
goyim
out of the dreams of the Gentiles. How
casually, how almost inadvertently he calls up King Oedipus and
Prince Hamlet side by side in what purports to be a casual three-page
digression; compelling the deep nightmare of fathers and sons dreamed
