KEPT BOOK SECRET.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 137, 13 June 1939, Page 7

KEPT BOOK SECRET.

EXILED PROFESSOR.

FEAR OF PERSECUTION. FREUD ON »LARGE HEARTED ENGLAND." (Special—By Air Mall.) LONDON, May 20. The threat of persecution forced Professor Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist to keep his most important book secret. In 1938 he wrote:— 'T shall not let this work be known, but that does not prevent me from writing it down ... It can then lie hidden until a time comes when it can safely venture into the light or until someone who reaches the same conclusions and opinions can be told; 'There was somebody in those dark days who thought the same as vou.' "

The book "Moses and Monotheism" has been published in Amsterdam, though the public were told that it would appear only fifter the author's death. It suggests that Moses was not a Tew but an Egyptian follower of the Pharoah Akhnaton. and it is from Akhna ton's sun-worship that he believes Judaism and Christianity to be derived.

■In the course of the argument Freud examines the cause of anti-Semitism, the continued existence of the Jewish race, and will offend large sections of public opinion by his whole treatment of religion, which he sees as a counterpart of neurosis in the individual.

The circumstances which have made I publication possible are ironically duel to Hitler. The research and most of the writing were done several years ago in the Vienna of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. But these dictatorships were so closely linked with the Roman Catholic Church that an offence caused to the] latter would have meant the suppression of the psycho-analytic movement whose headquarters were in Vienna. Accordingly Freud wrote his treatise and published only inoffensive extracts. In March, 1938, came the German invasion.

"In the certainty of feeing pursued now not only for my beliefs but also for : my 'race,' I left the city which from! early childhood onwards had been my! home for 78 vears. j

"I found,'' he goes on, "a warm welcome in beautiful, free, large-hearted England. There were no more external restraints on publication, or at least none from which one should shrink back."