FREUD’S NEW BOOK

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21360, 1 June 1939, Page 2

FREUD’S NEW BOOK

CHRISTIANITY BASED ON SUN-WORSHIP (Special—By Air Mai!) LONDON. May 13. The threat of persecution forced Professor Sigmund Freud, the famous psychologist to keep his most important book secret. In 1938, he wrote: “I shall not let this work be known, but that does not prevent me from writing it down ... ft 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 you'.” The book "Moses and Monotheism” has been published in Amsterdam, though the public were told that it would appear only after the author s death. It suggests that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian follower of the Pharoah Akhnaton, and it is from Akhnaton’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. Tt.e circumstances which have made publication possible are ironically due to Hitler. The research and mast 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 t'ne 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 being 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 years. "I found” lie 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."