"FREUD'S LAST MAJOR WORK… HIS MOST CONTROVERSIAL": FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH OF FREUD'S MOSES AND MONOTHEISM, 1939
FREUD, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. London: Hogarth Press, 1939. Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket.
First edition in English Freud's last major work, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, described by Freud as "quite a worthy exit," published the same year as the first German edition and shortly before his death that September.
"Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud's last major work, would also turn out to be his most controversial… It was not an easy book for Freud to write or to publish." Begun in the 1930s in Vienna, he resumed the work in London after fleeing the Nazis. Despite "no end of entreaties to let the project go… What did Freud do? He published of course—and not just in German but, as quickly and conspicuously as possible, in English… 'Quite a worthy exit,' he called the Moses book" (New York Times). "Of all the aspects of our collective life, none interested Freud more than religion. He devoted three of his five major speculative writings to interpreting it—Totem and Taboo (1912-13), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Moses and Monotheism (1939)." Freud develops a "distinctly psychoanalytic conception of… the rise of Judaism, which he rooted in the monotheistic worship of the Egyptian sun-god Aten… He believed, along with some other Biblical scholars, that Moses had been an Egyptian who converted the Jews to Egyptian monotheism; he also conjectured that Moses had been murdered by his people" (Norman, Freud). Not long after its publication, Freud died on September 23, 1939. Preceded by the same year's first edition in German, published in Amsterdam. With translation from the German by Katherine Jones, whose husband Ernest Jones was Freud's lifelong friend and biographer. Grinstein 144. Norman, Freud 63.
Book fine; slight soiling, tiny bit of tape reinforcement to verso of near-fine dust jacket.