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When entering Freud's studio, first in Vienna and later in London, it was impossible not to notice, alongside the bookcases densely filled with volumes, the richness of the collections of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and above all Greco-Roman archaeological artifacts. From his gymnasial education onwards, Freud displayed a profound and enduring engagement with classical culture, encompassing tragedy, mythology and archaeology alike. One significant example is his debt to the philologist Jacob Bernays, whose interpretation of Aristotelian catharsis informed Freud’s understanding of psychic purification. Between 1905 and 1906, in Psychopathic Characters on the Stage, Freud writes: “If the function of the drama, as has been assumed since Aristotle, is to excite pity and fear, and thus bring about a 'catharsis of the emotions’ we may describe this same purpose a little more fully if we say that the question is one of opening up sources of pleasure and enjoyment from within the sphere of life, just as wit and the comic do from within the sphere of the intellect, through the action of which many sources had been made inaccessible”. Similarly, Freud frequently associated the work of the psychoanalyst with that of the archaeologist, whose task is to bring to light the buried past upon which the visible present is constructed: in Studies on Hysteria, he observes: “This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.” The analogies are numerous: the shared research activity, the fascination with the interpenetration of past and present, and the lasting enthusiasm for Schliemann’s recent discoveries. As Donald Kuspit has demonstrated, the archaeological metaphor played a crucial role in enabling the founder of psychoanalysis to legitimize psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. In this sense, as Vered Lev Kenaan explains, the tangible presence of archaeological artefacts in Freud’s study was intended to represent metaphorically the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, and thus the psychological journey upon which the patient was about to embark. Finally, this classicist and philhellenic orientation culminate in Freud’s progressive identification with the figure of Oedipus. Oedipus is not only the tragic protagonist of Sophocles’ drama, but also a symbol of Enlightenment rationality and of the classical knowledge transmitted through German Idealism, particularly Schelling. He embodies the hero who struggles against fate in the name of human freedom, a figure of cognitive superiority and intellectual mastery, and, as Schelling describes him, “the mystery of our spirit”. However, the role of antiquity as an ideal source of inspiration is not without its tensions. In the letter later published as “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis”, Freud recounts to Romain Rolland his 1904 journey to Athens, presenting the visit to the Acropolis as coinciding with the emergence of a profound identity crisis. The fulfilment of the gymnasium dream of travel and worldly exploration becomes, paradoxically, a source of anguish rather than joy, rooted in a sense of guilt at having surpassed the father. If archaeology had served as a metaphor for the childhood of both humanity and civilisation, the encounter with the Acropolis reawakens Freud’s own childhood experience: “It must be that a sense of guilt was attached to the satisfaction in having got so far. There was something about it that was wrong, that was from earliest times forbidden. It was something to do with a child’s criticism of his father, with the undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier childhood. It seems as though the essence of success were to have got further than one’s father, and as though to excel one’s father were still something forbidden”.
Freud’s intellectual success thus appears not as fulfilment but as its opposite, a state of derealisation in which the Hellenised son is punished for having distanced himself from Judaism. Although Freud often appears to celebrate his philhellenic achievements as affirmations of scientific rationalism in opposition to the constraints of Jewish monotheism, these two cultural and ideological poles coexist persistently within his thought, without any definitive triumph of one over the other. To demonstrate this, the present analysis will examine the central conceptual nuclei of Freud’s work, including dreams, childhood, sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and reflections on civilisation and religion, in order to argue that psychoanalysis does not represent the victory of Hellenism over Judaism, but rather a sustained meditation on the irreducible and unresolved tension between these two worlds.
To challenge the assumption of Freud’s unambiguous philhellenism, it is useful to consider two related anti-classicist positions. In 1946, Erich Auerbach published the opening chapter of Mimesis, entitled “Odysseus' scar”, in which he outlines a paradigmatic opposition between two modes of representing reality. On the one hand stands the Homeric style, characterised by luminous clarity and an abundance of surface detail; on the other, the style of the Old Testament, marked by ellipsis and depth, and more attuned to the tragic and problematic dimensions of human existence. Through an analysis of Book XIX of the Odyssey and of the episode of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, Auerbach argues that while the Homeric narrative is “clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated”, the biblical text deliberately leaves spatial, causal, and temporal connections unexpressed, thereby demanding interpretation (Auerbach, 2013). By concentrating exclusively on decisive moments, the biblical narrative achieves a unity of purpose which Schiller regarded as the defining feature of drama. In Auerbach’s account, epic and tragedy converge within biblical narration.
This analysis resonates with Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of the Tragedy. If Homer may be identified as the Apollonian poet par excellence, it is nonetheless the Dionysian impulse that provides the decisive force behind the emergence of Greek tragedy, which unites both Dionysian and Apollonian principles. In the first chapter of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche associates Apollo with measure, restraint, and the « sacredness of his beauteous appearance » (Nietzsche, 2003), comparing him to the man ensnared in the veil of Maya, the sailor who "unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, sits in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits quietly supported by and trusting in his principium individuationis." (Schopenhauer, 2020). The Dionysian, by contrast, corresponds to the horror that seizes humanity when the forms of sensible knowledge collapse, revealing the painful truth of existence. The Apollonian finds expression in the Olympian religion, which Nietzsche contrasts with the Jewish-Christian tradition of « asceticism, spirituality, or duty» (Nietzsche, 2003), celebrating instead a flourishing and sensuous existence, « floating in sweet sensuality » (Nietzsche, 2003). Paradoxically, this structure aligns more closely with Auerbach’s account of biblical narrative depth than with Homeric clarity.
From this perspective, Freud’s relationship to his Jewish heritage appears more receptive than is often assumed. In a 1925 letter to the Jüdische Presszentrale, Freud reflects critically on the deficiencies of his Jewish education and expresses regret at his limited knowledge of Hebrew language and literature: “In the time of my youth our free-thinking religious instructors set no store by their pupils' acquiring a knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature. My education in this field was therefore extremely behindhand, as I have since often regretted”. Even if David Bakan’s attempt to trace psychoanalysis back to Jewish mystical traditions remains contentious, it is undeniable that Freud’s thought maintains a profound connection to his Jewish origins. Having recalibrated the respective influences of Jewish and Hellenistic cultures in Freud’s intellectual formation, it is now possible to examine how this synthesis takes shape in his work.
In 1914, Freud devoted an essay of applied psychoanalysis to Michelangelo’s Moses, the monumental sculpture housed in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, of which a cast existed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Freud first encountered the statue in 1901 during his initial visit to Rome and studied it more extensively during his second stay in 1912. The essay was initially published anonymously, a reticence that Isabelle Alfandary, in her essay Le Moïse de Sigmund Freud ou l’autre en soi, has interpreted as reflecting the deeply personal nature of Freud’s identification with the biblical figure. Freud writes: “For no piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero's glance! Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned- the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols.” (Freud, 1937). In this passage, Freud identifies not only with the Jewish people “as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned” (Freud, 1937), but also begins the process of identification with Moses himself, a trajectory that culminates in the publication of Moses and Monotheism in 1938.
What strikes Freud most forcefully about the statue is the moment of the biblical episode chosen by Michelangelo: the instant of restraint before violence. Moses has descended from Mount Sinai, witnessed the worship of the golden calf, and stands on the threshold of destructive rage. “This is the scene upon which his eyes are turned, this is the spectacle which calls out the feelings depicted in his countenance -feelings which in the next instant will launch his great frame into violent action. Michelangelo has chosen this last moment of hesitation, of calm before the storm, for his representation. In the next instant Moses will spring to his feet -his left foot is already raised from the ground- dash the Tables to the earth and let loose his rage upon his faithless people.” (Freud, 1937). Freud notes that the Tablets are curiously overturned, as if they had slipped from Moses’ arms. This apparent incongruity raises an interpretive problem that Freud resolves through a highly consequential reading. According to the founder of psychoanalysis, Michelangelo did not intend to represent the initial moment of violent and irrational destruction, but rather its negation: the moment in which an excess of anger is brought to an end, and the repression of the instinctual impulse allows the civilizing mission to prevail over the destructive drive. The statue thus stages a conflict between the death drive and rational control, between the human and the superhuman, resolved in favour of the repression of instinct. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud will later define Judaism as the “renunciation of instinctual gratification” (Freud, 1974), a formulation that retrospectively clarifies his interpretation of Michelangelo’s Moses as the embodiment of sublimation and self-mastery, in which ethical restraint triumphs over impulsive violence.
In this regard, two consequences must be considered. First, in The Moses of Michelangelo, Freud paradoxically appears to attribute to Judaism a rational attitude that had hitherto been associated primarily with the Hellenistic tradition. In repressing his anger while punishing the cult of the golden calf, Moses seems to enact a behavioural model closer to Greek ideals of rational self-control than to what is conventionally perceived as the Jewish paradigm. Yet Moses remains unequivocally the legislator and central prophetic figure of Judaism. Freud’s interpretation thus destabilizes traditional cultural oppositions by assigning rational restraint to a figure foundational to Jewish religious identity.
Second, this analysis of Moses’ civilizing mission, understood as the act of a founding hero who establishes a community through ethical principles, opens onto four further areas of inquiry that illuminate the problematic relationship between Greek and Jewish traditions: the father–son relationship, the Oedipus complex, the question of identity, and the structural analogy between mass psychology and the individual psyche.
As previously suggested, in the name of this civilizing mission, and by virtue of his Jewish familial origins, Freud was led to identify himself with Moses. Both figures occupy the position of a founding father: Moses as the guide and legislator who leads a people toward a new faith and establishes the ethical foundations of Judaism; Freud as the intellectual who introduced to the scientific community (and ultimately to humanity at large) a revolutionary medical and theoretical discipline aimed at explaining the functioning of the human psyche in all its dimensions: religious, ethical, social, medical, and historical. In this sense, Freud may be regarded as the father of psychoanalysis in a manner structurally analogous to Moses’ role within Jewish tradition.
This identification must be read considering the autobiographical episode of Freud’s visit to the Acropolis in Athens, where he experienced a moment of derealization accompanied by a profound sense of guilt, that Freud himself interpreted as stemming from the son’s perceived superiority over the father. Crucially, this episode cannot be reduced to a merely personal experience. The figures of father and son at stake are not limited to Jacob and Sigismund Schlomo Freud; rather, they expand into a broader symbolic constellation. On one side stand Moses, Laius, the prehistory of humanity, Jerusalem, and Athens; on the other stand Freud, Oedipus, modernity, psychoanalysis, Vienna, and London. This expanded framework situates Freud’s subjective experience within a transhistorical and intercultural structure. At this point, a paradox becomes apparent. While Freud identifies himself with Moses as the founding father, within the father–son dialectic these two figures are nonetheless differentiated. Moses embodies the paternal figure par excellence, whereas Freud -both as a Jew and as a son burdened by the guilt of surpassing the father- occupies the position of Oedipus. Yet, as will become evident, the contrasts and analogies between these categories are far more fluid and malleable than they initially appear.
This brings us to the Oedipus complex, another figure with whom Freud explicitly identified and which reveals numerous analogies with Moses. In the third essay of Moses and Monotheism, devoted to the people of Israel and the monotheistic religion, Freud draws a direct parallel between group psychology and the condition of the individual psyche. In both cases, the structure is the same: the killing of an original father, the subsequent removal of the event by the sons, followed by neurotic repression and an enduring unconscious sense of guilt. Freud situates these processes in what he defines as the childhood of both the individual and civilization.
To illustrate this parallel, Freud juxtaposes, on the one hand, Oedipus, who kills his father and develops a sexual desire toward his mother, and, on the other, Moses, who is murdered by the Jewish people, an act followed by a regression toward matriarchy and totemism. In both narratives, the traumatic event precipitates a crisis of identity. In the case of Oedipus, this crisis is articulated through the riddle of the Sphinx, which interrogates the very essence of human nature. In the case of Moses, Freud repeatedly questions his belonging to the Jewish people, particularly in the first and second essays of Moses and Monotheism.
This problem of identity is already powerfully articulated by Freud in the preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo, where he writes: “No reader of [the Hebrew version of] this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers -as well as from every other religion- and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: ‘Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence’” (Freud, 1958).
The question that interrogates Freud’s Jewishness thus coincides with the question of Jewish faith itself: the problem of identity articulated through the figure of the father and inherited by the various sons. It is for this reason that Freud felt compelled to investigate the possibility of an Egyptian origin for Moses, an attempt to displace the prehistory of group psychology into a polytheistic cultural framework more closely aligned with the Greek world.
This hypothesis further supports the claim that Freud perceived not opposition but affinity between Greek and Jewish traditions. In the first essay of Moses and Monotheism, Freud cites Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, summarizing its central thesis as follows: “A hero is someone who has had the courage to rebel against his father and has in the end victoriously overcome him.” This definition clearly applies to Oedipus- and, by extension, to Freud himself -but it is also unexpectedly applied to Moses. Although Freud questions whether the legend of the child exposed in a basket on the waters of the Nile can legitimately confer heroic status in the strict mythological sense, he nevertheless acknowledges that the Jewish people have consistently represented their founding father as a heroic figure.
Moses and Oedipus, and by metonymy the Jewish and Greek worlds, thus emerge not as opposing forces between which Freud must arbitrate, but rather as different articulations of a shared structural dynamic. Together, they form a mosaic whose recomposed image reveals persistent analogies beneath apparent differences. The opposition between Moses as father and Oedipus as son, their shared heroic stature, and their common engagement with the problem of identity all point to the same underlying structure: the killing of the father and the emergence of neurosis in the familial sphere on the one hand, and the manifestation of the same process at the level of group psychology on the other.
Significantly, both figures occupy a central position in Freud’s theory of dream interpretation. In the case of Oedipus, Freud does not so much psychoanalyze the Sophoclean character as the audience’s reaction to his tragedy. If modern spectators continue to identify with the drama and its ancient questions, Freud argues, this must indicate the persistence of a mythical past within the unconscious. Similarly, the collective amnesia that overtakes the Jewish people after the murder of Moses completes the circle of neurotic and prehistoric repression that Freud had first outlined at the beginning of the century in The Interpretation of Dreams.
We began from the hypothesis that Freud had symbolically “killed” both his father and his Jewish heritage in the name of a philhellenic victory. What has emerged, however, is not only that this hypothesis is untenable, but that the Greek and Jewish worlds contributed jointly, and not in opposition, to the formation of psychoanalysis and to Freud’s intellectual project. A further question nevertheless remains: how was such a convergence possible?
To address this question in the most coherent interpretive framework, it is necessary to examine a concept developed by Freud in The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche) and by Otto Rank in Der Doppelgänger, namely the figure of the double. The uncanny designates something that was once deeply familiar within psychic life, originating in a remote past, but which has subsequently been alienated through processes of splitting and repression. This alienation is facilitated by the projection of one’s most troubling, forbidden, or disturbing aspects onto an external figure. The resulting affective disturbance arises precisely from the return of what has been repressed: something that appears at once familiar and estranged.
The uncanny thus emerges from the subject’s inability to establish a clear boundary between self and other. This instability produces both fascination and terror, as the subject is confronted not only with the collapse of a stable identity, but also with the negative image of the self: what one might have been, but is not. In this sense, the dynamics of splitting and repression may be understood as the conceptual keystone of the relationship between Greek and Jewish traditions. In a prehistoric or pre-symbolic past, these traditions may be conceived as forming a single structure of thought. Freud’s analysis of Egyptian society in Moses and Monotheism may be read as identifying one of the earliest historical moments in the gradual separation of these two cultural formations.
From this primordial unity, two models of thought emerged that are at once opposed and mutually reflective. Greeks and Jews, Oedipus and Moses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, reason and faith, son and father, reality and dream, the Odyssey and the Ancient Will: each of these binaries articulates a relation of tension that is simultaneously one of complementarity. The opposition does not efface the shared origin; rather, it presupposes it.
Within this framework, psychoanalysis -understood as a discipline devoted to the exploration of the unconscious and the recovery of the past- becomes the privileged site of the uncanny return. It constitutes the terrain upon which these two forms of otherness re-emerge as recognizably related, revealing themselves as differentiated expressions of a common archaic identity. From this perspective, Freud’s attempt to demonstrate the Egyptian origin of Moses may be interpreted as a theoretical gesture consistent with this logic of doubling: an effort to locate Jewish origins within a cultural matrix that precedes and encompasses both Greek rationality and Jewish monotheism.
This hypothesis finds a suggestive parallel in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Hegel identifies the episode of Oedipus and the Sphinx, “the great Egyptian symbol”, as one of the decisive moments in the history of human culture, marking the point at which Greek reason separates itself from Eastern, and specifically Egyptian, wisdom. Yet the very notion of separation presupposes a prior unity. If Greek reason emerges through its differentiation from Egyptian thought, then it follows logically that both Greeks and Jews must once have belonged to a shared cultural and symbolic body.
It is this original alignment, subsequently split, repressed, and repeatedly returning, that psychoanalysis seeks to uncover.
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