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ROBERT JAY LIFTON
Moses and Monotheism.
Apart from Erikson's connection as a young
man with the Freudian circle in Vienna, and his continuing iden- )
tification of himself as a Freudian,
his
title is meant to echo Freud's
phrase (mentioned earlier), "the man Moses." Freud used that
same phrase as his original title for the book he later called
Moses
and Monotheism.
I might add that Freud's original subtitle was
A Historical Novel,
which suggests an interesting element of self–
irony in relationship to a historical method we must now view
as highly dubious (I refer to the kind of evidence Freud employed
to develop his thesis that Moses was an Egyptian, and that Moses
was killed by the Jews). That subtitle has also found another re–
cent echo, probably less intentional-
History as a Novel, The Novel
as History
- the subtitle chosen by a promising young existential–
ist psychohistorian named Norman Mailer for his much-awarded
book,
Armies of the Night.
The self-irony in juxtaposing history and
fiction does not necessarily suggest that either Freud or Mailer
lacked belief in his own views, but rather that each felt himself
dealing with a kind of truth that took him beyond conventional
historical description. Rather than truth stranger than fiction, each
was suggesting a form of fictionalized truth, or perhaps fiction truer
than truth.
Returning to Erikson, there are other ways in which his con–
cept of the great man parallels Freud's. At the end of
Moses,
Freud
said that "The great man influences his contemporaries in two
ways: through
his
personality and through the idea for which he
stands" - an "idea" which may "lay stress on an old group of
wishes in the masses, or point to a new aim for their wishes."
Freud saw Moses as having taken the Jews to a "higher level of
spirituality," largely by means of the "dematerializing" of God and
the prohibiting of the worship of a visible form of God. Similarly,
Erikson saw as Luther's fundamental achievement,
his
"new em–
phasis on man in
inner
conflict and his salvation through introspec–
tive perfection" - an achievement and an emphasis Erikson com–
pared with Kierkegaard's existentialism and Freud's psychoanalysis.
Freud and Erikson both depicted the great man as a spiritual hero,
as a man who achieves an intrapsychic breakthrough.
But Erikson also took several crucial steps away from Freud.
Instead of an instinctual idiom - Freud's view of the great man as
