Freud and the Non-European

’Said’s reading of Freud’s reading of the history of the Jewish people is undeniably brilliant’ Times Literary Supplement

In this influential lecture, Edward Said explores Freud’s foundational work Moses and Monotheism to rethink the relationship between identity, politics and psychoanalysis. The result is a study illuminating both Freud’s thinking and that of Said, on whom the great psychoanalyst was a formative influence.

Was Moses Jewish or an Egyptian? The question undermines any simple ascription of identity, highlighting the limits of these categories. Said suggests that such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity might, if embodied in political reality, form the basis for a new understanding between Jews and Palestinians. In contrast, Israel’s relentless march towards an exclusively Jewish state denies any sense of a more complex, inclusive past.

With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a response by Jacqueline Rose.

EDWARD SAID (1935-2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place.