Freud and the Non-European

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Summary: Said on Freud: duet of Masters
Review: 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 ORIGIN OF CIVILIZATION; the maverick genius anthropologist from London Chris Knight, author of the amazing BLOOD RELATIONS, MENSTRUATION AND THE ORIGINS OF CULTURE; and every unearthing of sacred texts and their actual implications and contextual significance, from E.A. Wallis Budge's translation of the misnamed Egyptian BOOK OF THE DEAD and the PYRAMID TEXTS (see DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION AND THOUGHT IN ANCIENT EGYPT, James Henry Breasted). Straight through to the NAG HAMMADI LIBRARY's refutation of the overwhelming majority of orthodox Christian tradition and historical perspective. Indeed, with the re-establishment of Ancient Egypt being essentially an African society in modern cultural thought (which is, lest we forget, in northeast Africa; not unlike the Ancient Sudan [with even older pyramids], the Dogon or ancient Ethiopia), the very concepts of *race* when referring to Semitic people becomes such a firestorm that politics as it currently exists in the region can only inevitably be understood when taking it into PSYCHOLOGICAL if not socio-economic context.

The natives had been restless on the other side of the intellectual/cultural fence long before Freud acknowledged their existence. Freud simply made the avoidance of such such an issue of integrity for the modern Western intellectual that it cannot be ignored, without the selling of the Western soul.

Edward Said was never known for ignoring anything of substance in modern culture or intellectual life. And with friends like Noam Chomsky, who excoriates the hypocrisy of modern intelligentsia with reckless abandon before eating breakfast in the morning, he does not let you down here. Whether or not you hold on to preconceived notions about the current conflict in the Middle East among Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the world, this book, and Freud's MOSES AND MONOTHEISM will wash away your rationalizations for doing so like moss on a dry rock on the beach hit by high tide. Said tells us unquestionably, as he had done all his life, that there are some things that must be discussed and debated, if language is to have any vaule at all, and our way of life is to make any sense. And he does so, as is his nature, with elegance, lucidity and unparalleled brilliance. This is Said's intellectual Satyagraha; he is a Gandhi for our modern minds.