Freudipus 

by George Kozma 

It is not up-to-date in a post modern age to speak about the Truth or about Essentials, but hopefully it will become clear, why I must try it once again. In the last three thousand years the majority of the civilizations have relegated to the background of the Jewish component of their origin: Christians and Moslems deny their Jewish part - as Freud would have put it: they commit patricide, killing their "father." Of course, Freud himself writes in an assimilationist mood - denying himself his Jewish tradition, when he stresses, (in his essay entitled: "Moses") that the origin of Judaism's unitarian God-belief stems from Egyptian sources (like Ekhnatons'Aton-religion), so Jews only projected this central figure to their "mountain demon," called Yahve. 

Freud never mentions, that Oedipus - his main hero (whose name, according to Graves, meaning Big-Foot, derives really from Oedi-phallos - has had an Eastern ancestor (called Kadmos, meaning Eastern), a descendant of the son of Noah. Maybe a Jewish family? (Or not quite, if they stem from Noah's son, Kana'an and Cham, who cut off his father's testicles.) Interestingly, Freud never mentions the tragic fate of this family's members: Kadmos- descendant Tantalos, who offers his son, Pelops, to the gods - so that Poseidon falls in love with him. The son of Pelops is pursued lovingly by Laios, the father of Oedipus. The other sons of Pelops are also sacrificing their sons - to give them as a meal to their father... Freud only mentions, that he is raised in a foreign environment: unwittingly he acts against the taboo of patricide and incest - which are central in the Jewish Decalogue, by the way. He never makes it explicit, that his central myth (Oedipus) is based on a homo-erotic family saga - one of the main taboos of Jewish-based religions (although there are arguments pointing to the Persian-Iranian origin of this homophobic asceticism.) 

Why is it relevant that for most of the time, no thinker - and among them, not even Freud, who is one of the few thinkers, who are having an effect on our everyday lives - mentions the fact, that the God of the Jews has a name - a Name stemming from the verb "to be" namely. (Even lexicons do know, that the name Yehove is related to the verb Haya-Hove-Yihye, meaning was - is being - will be, and the Bible explicitly states it: "I will be who I will be," says the translation. The Bible does not say "God wants you to be generous" - it says, that the Make-Be-er tells you to be generous - at least, in this transliteration the question of legitimacy is clear: the Lord of Being (or Changing, Transforming for that matter) "has" jurisdiction about all facets of being (supposing it - or He - exists somehow independently from the rest of existence - or Creation - itself.) Because "it" is intertwined with everything else, "it" (the text) stresses the importance of "signs" (in Hebrew it is "tsioon"), that remind us of this central existential Being-Name. We are "echoing" "Him" - in Hebrew it rhymes interestingly to the people1s name: "yehoodi"-Jewish. (Hod means echo.) 

Many philosopher (from Iustinus to Pseudo-Dyonysios, until Schleiermacher and Sartre, from Augistinus, Duns Scotus, Averroes, Avicenna, until Abu Bakr, or from Parmenides to Master Eckhardt up until Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sprengler, Jaspers, Heidegger and today Derrida) posits as a central entity the Ens, the Nought, the Being, Existence or the Sign, the Symbol, - and many religions also arrive to the concept ot an omni-present entity (the Creator) : the Khmers in Cambodia use this name in their language (U-Bley-U-Nongbhu-Nongthau), the Indonesians (Zanaharee) too, the Greeks' Demiourgos, while the gla-gla signs of South African Ibo-s or the Finno-Ugrian Shamanic "echoing" and the Chinese Tao's lake-mirror are also "echoes." 

Freud (in his drive to discredit religion as a neurotic, sick self- delusion, which it can be, of course) - together with his century's atheistic materialism - wanted to deny the importance of the centrality of the concept of "Being" (and also of Transformation), because he wanted to arrive to a real transformation in the phantasy-world of each of us. Trying to discredit the Judaistic Existence-idol, he operated the same (neurotically compulsive) way as many religious believers, who think, that if they use (or do not use) certain words, it can - miraculously in a wishful way - affect "Reality." Symptomatically, when Freud finds his surrogate basic myth - the Oedipus mythologeme - he denies and omits the ominous fact about the homo-erotic family story of his hero. The main theme - what is a man, what constitutes the human "being" - is related to the sexual roles' institution: that is, where we experience every day the challenge of positing "who" we are, the identity-question: "I Am Who I Am" - which is God's Name. 

The main source of anti-Judaistic tendencies (that have different causes) is the unequivocally homophobic and anti-sexual character of the One-God religions (and their origin, the Jewish Bible). Freud's omitting (censuring) his Jewish tradition and also his partial rendering of the Oedipus myth are two facets of the same coin: the instinctual ambivalence and deep bisexuality in many humans, or in many of us. It is quite interesting that Freud comes to this very same conclusion in spite of his own double denial. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #427 Underground eXperts United 1998 uXu #427 Call INTERNATIONAL INFORMATION RETRIEVAL GUILD -> telnet iirg.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

uXu

eZines

John Labovitz's eZine List