Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, but not for its accuracy.
Review: My title sums up my feelings about this book. I've read a bit of Freud, but this book, so far, is the most interesting, engaging, and engrossing of the lot. Perhaps this is because Freud occasionally acknowledges the tenuous nature of his argument. What is that argument? I wish not to give away the entire book, but its crux is that Freud begins with the proposition that Moses was an Egyption, a follower of Aton religion, and when that religion vanished after the reign of one king, he passed it on to the Jews. It must first be said that Freud is not the only one to claim that Hebraism/Judaism developed monotheism out of the Egyptian milieu. The most interesting thing is that Freud claims to find this, psychoanalyticaly, in the very myth of Moses' birth, which he argues in an archetypal heroic one. Be that as it may, I cannot give this book 5 stars because the last chapter, though he introduces, quite lucidly, the ideas of the Ego, Superego, and the Id, I came away feeling that the argument could have been made in half the space. Nevertheless, a hearty recommendation.
Rating: 
Summary: Intellectual but pleasant confusion
Review: Reading Freud is always a pleasure, especially his essays on Religion and Culture. His style is so refined and clear, that I have often wondered if it wasn't one of the reasons for the wide approval he received. The strange thing in reading about the origin of a religion is that it confuses and forces you to start from 'tabula rasa'. Being raised a Catholic, I can't help but 'subconciously believing' Jewish religion older than Moses, whereas Freud claims that he started it. But the confusion is very enlightening and intellectually tantalizing. Although much of his views on the Egyptian origin of the name 'Moses' have been scientifically doubted, the book is still powerful enough to make you think. And that, I believe, is a rare quality.
Rating:
Summary: fascinating but very speculative
Review: This is a fairly obscure and especially speculative work of Freud's, published originally in the year he died. The argument is fascinating. Its exposition, however, (as Freud himself concedes within it) is repetitive and at times tedious. There were two particular sticking points for me: 1) It assumes one has read Freud's "Totem and Taboo" (I hadn't). 2) The larger argument is contigent on (extra-somatic) racial memory, a biological impossibility. Defending this notion Freud makes several remarks that tarnish his philosophy and psychology as a whole, and this is unfortunate. I'd prefer you read Freud's "The Question of Lay Analysis" (a lucid and engaging account of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis), his "Civilization and its Discontents", and his "The Future of an Illusion". (And while I'm recommending things, there is also, for musicians, "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz Rock Keyboardist" by Jeff Burns.
Rating: 
Summary: Admit it! You hate your Dad!
Review: This is my favorite nut book of all time, principally because it was written by THE most original thinker of the 20th century. A conspiracy book by a mediocre paranoid is par for the course; but one written by a genius of the first order is bound to be outstanding. To fully understand M&M one has to be somewhat conversant with Totem and Taboo, and Freud reiterates those basic premises here as well. Briefly they are as follows: The origin of society begins with a tribe in which the dominant male gets all the women, including his sisters and Mommy. His sons are understandably upset at being left out of the fun and complain, so Dad kills or castrates them. Or makes the mistake of being lenient and simply drives them off. The sons, unable to find females of their own, band together go back and murder dad. Then, of course, they eat his body. There being too many sons (and feeling repressed guilt at killing their old man) they make taboos against incest thus establishing the rule of law. (Bet you didn't know this was the origin of Magna Carta, et al). This keeps the gene pool safe from inbreeding but leads to all sorts of guilt feelings which get acted out politically-- not the least of which is a worshipping of Mommy, which leads to LHM -a Literal Historical Matriarchy. (And to think feminists dislike Freud) Next, they get fed up with being bossed about by Mom (and who wouldn't?) so they re-establish the patriarchy; only this time they stick to the rule of law, because they can't afford further fraticidal bloodshed and they invent polytheism to boot. But deeply repressed father hatred looms within, which leads to the final step: monotheism, in which God is an avenging Father who must be appeased before he starts castrating again. . . (Naturally there are sub-plots--Christianity belongs to the religion of The Son who becomes more important than The Father, Islam is a attempt to restore The Father, etc.) I forget what all this has to do with Moses, and halfway through the book, so does Freud who goes off on a tangent about how the Catholic church failed to protect him in Vienna against the Nazis, so he was forced to flee to England, where things are now better, and though he thought of destroying the manuscript he figured he was old, so what the hell, might as well publish it. Freud refuses to use the 's' word --speculate--Or rather he waffles. At one point he admits that all he's writing is conjecture and the reader should know that and not force him to repeat it in every paragraph. But a couple of paragraphs later, he appeals to his clinical material (his patients and his own fantasies) and his deductive powers in a manner that could only be described as objective--or, to be less kind, dogmatic. Will the real S.G please stand up? In any case, the speculations/objective deductions regarding Akhnaten, the case for there being 2 Moses's -one got murdered and presumably eaten by his children. The myth 'in reverse' of the childhood of Moses (don't ask) and what it all REALLY means make for fascinating and compelling reading.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant and capitivating essay on monotheism.
Review: This is one of the best books I have ever read. It's a page turner -- a brilliant uncovering of the historical Moses. This book is also so affecting because Freud wrote it right before and during the holocaust. The background that he is writing from is part of the drama of the book. Read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Religion as the manifestation of the collective unconscious
Review: This is the last book written by Freud. Moses and Monotheism was published in totum in 1939, the year Freud died in London, where he got residence along with his family to scape the Nazi persecution against Jews in Austria, where he thought he was safe. The hypotheses raised in the book are polemical, and this seems to be a kind of a Freudian trademark, and they are nothing less than: 1- Moses was in fact Egyptian and worked as a general in the staff of the Egyptian pharaoh Ikhenaton, who urged the untill then polytheists Egyptians to adore Aton as only God and to adopt monotheism. When the pharaoh died, Moses tried to convince the Jews working at the northeast region of Egypt that they were the chosen people and to follow him. Many of the theories present in this book are in fact development of a hypothesis already raised by Freud in his earlier book "Totem and Taboo" and represents a serious attempt at demolishing the foundations of both the Mosaic religion as Christianity. The idea is that a band of brothers opressed by the father in fact killed him, and out of a guilty feeling payed tribute to him in a series of disguised primitive rituals to honor him in group. 2 - The circuncisiom was already practise at Egypt and was not something invented by Jeovah as a sign of the alliance (covenant)between Him and the Jewish people. Also, in Freud's hypothesis, Jeovah was a demi-god of the Volcanoes and many of his later carachteristics were later adoptions of Egyptian religious tendencies by means of the Levites, who, again in Freud's view, were not the son of Levi (one of the ten tribes of Israel) but rather were also of Egyptian origin and followers of Moses, who in fact was killed by the Egyptian jews, etc... If you think this is all the book portrays, you are pretty much wrong. There are still a lot of pretty much original and polemical hypotheses raised by Freud which would astound anyone unprepared for such a reading, specially the Jewish and Catholic community . One has to remember also, that Freud was of Jewish origin, and this, to say the least, adds salt to the whole story. The book follows Freud trademark, not exactly a surprise for the man who said that he was "to disturb the nights of the humankind." Good reading.
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