No. 5 - The Holy Romanish Moses

Summary

This chapter explores Freud’s publications on Biblical prophets in the new interdisciplinary journal Imago that Freud founded to specifically deal with non-medical applications of psychoanalysis. This chapter analyzes Freud’s anonymously published essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) anew as an extension of and a direct consequence of the disputations over Jung’s Jonah-type and Maeder’s teleological function of dreams. In his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, Freud would take up his defense in Rome, where Pope Leo X had excommunicated Luther in 1521. Disguised as “an untrained layman,” Freud sets up a new hermeneutical arena far from the site of Lutheran Biblical exegetics on Jonah and before the Catholic Renaissance master Michelangelo, an artist Jung claimed expressed the “Jonah-type” in his pietàs. Applying and parodying the aesthetic arguments Jung and Maeder utilized in their recent publicatins, Freud uses the trope of the “artless Jew” by shifting the dialogue from typological interpretations of stubborn Jewish prophets to German-language art historical interpretations of a Catholic representation of Moses.