Freud and the Non-European

By Edward W. Said

Book Overview

'Said's reading of Freud's reading of the history of the Jewish people is undeniably brilliant' Times Literary Supplement

In this influential lecture, Edward Said explores Freud's foundational work Moses and Monotheism to rethink the relationship between identity, politics and psychoanalysis. The result is a study illuminating both Freud's thinking and that of Said, on whom the great psychoanalyst was a formative influence.

Was Moses Jewish or an Egyptian? The question undermines any simple ascription of identity, highlighting the limits of these categories. Said suggests that such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity might, if embodied in political reality, form the basis for a new understanding between Jews and Palestinians. In contrast, Israel's relentless march towards an exclusively Jewish state denies any sense of a more complex, inclusive past.

With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a response by Jacqueline Rose.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1836740417
• ISBN13: 9781836740414
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Said on Freud: duet of Masters

Freud's life and work (as brilliantly and controversially detailed in THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH by Jeffrey Masson) is rife with problems the likes of which adds to both the kaleidoscopic complexities and the singular horrors of the 20th century unlike few in world history. But the two most powerful Pandora's boxes in Western Civilization could arguably be the ones he opened with two works: THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA (1896), which proved under no uncertain terms that virtually all adult neuroses is a product of child abuse, neglect and pedophilia (a proof he backpedaled from soon after writing due to political pressure in the psychiatric community) and MOSES AND MONOTHEISM. We can only wonder which of the two is a greater bombshell to Western Civilization--academic and cultural. Both are routinely ignored in the disciplines they impact virtually as if they have never been written. With FREUD AND THE NON-EUROPEAN, the Master Edward Said does not reopen the can of worms Freud opened with his reminder that the foundation of Judaism is in ancient Egyptian monotheism (in polytheistic disguise), and as such ancient Egyptian culture. He reveals the fact that it has never been closed, as he goes down but one road of the book's unrefuted implications to courageously confront the possibilities of embracing it for the political future of the Semitic people of the Middle East--Israeli and Palestinian. If the Israeli and the Palestinian are one people after all, why exactly are the fighting? How does this color the meaning of an Israeli sate that excludes them? And what does it do to the soul of both sides in the process, when Cain is essentially fighting Abel, writ large? MOSES AND MONOTHEISM only begins to upset the foundations of Western political thought here, as Said only hints at but does not go into deeply, away from his central thesis. The fact is, Freud, with this work, opened the floodgates that separate religious and cultural history from anthropology; Judaism/Jewish history from Egyptology; and traditional anthropology from its more heterodox twin and the heretical historians of science. There are innumerable volumes of work from unsung scientists and historians, linguists and anthropologists, proving Freud's thesis in a hundred different ways both more succinctly and more academically than he did, decades and centuries before he ever seriously thought of the social implications of the subject matter. The 19th century Godfrey Higgins' ANACALYPSIS; Gerald Massey's ANCIENT EGYPT THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD and A BOOK OF THE BEGINNINGS; dozens of others in and out of the four hundred year old scientific/historical discipline known as Metrology.... These works flow not from Freud, but into the world for many, inronically, through him. They flow through the intellectual heart of Freud's Achilles-like dip into the true river of intellectual invulnerability on this topic into the work of the often maligned but essentially unrefuted C.A. Diop, like THE AFRICAN ORIGI