Monotheism, according to Freud, is the first religion to recognize the father behind the image of God: "The reestablishment of the primal father in his historic rights was a great step forward but it could not be the end." This development was related in Freud's view to what he believed to be the Jews' distinctive spirituality. According to Freud, a conceptual, cultural, and moral revolution occurred when Moses introduced the Jews to an abstract conception of God. By prohibiting the making of divine images, Moses helped the Jews to triumph over the senses since they now no longer envisioned God in human form. This triumph of spirituality over the senses was an instinctual renunciation which, like all such renunciations, Freud viewed as a sign of maturation and progress. The Mosaic prohibition on images raised God and the Jews to a higher level of spirituality, Freud believed, and moved the Jews to a superior position over those who have remained in bondage to the senses. Freud thus saw a direct relationship between this transformation of a people and the renunciations of instinctual gratifications which a boy must accomplish on the way to maturity: "The religion which began with the prohibition against making an image of God develops more and more in the course of centuries into a religion of instinctual renunciations. It is not that it would demand sexual abstinence; it is content with a marked restriction of sexual freedom. God, however, becomes entirely removed from sexuality and elevated into the ideal of ethical perfection. But ethics is a limitation of instinct."
Freud sees a connection between the fatherhood of God, the prohibition on images, sexual renunciation, and the triumph of the spirit over the senses. And he sees the prohibition on images as linked to masculine renunciation. But Freud does not sufficiently theorize these connections. He does not ask why a prohibition against the image of the father God would be connected to sexual renunciation. Had he asked this question, he might have interpreted the Jewish prohibition on images as a means of veiling the body of the Father God. It is curious, in fact, that Freud did not interpret the prohibition on divine images as a prohibition against seeing the father's body. In part, he was surely misled by the long history of tradition that claimed that the God of the Jews did not have a body. But given Freud's propensity to depart from conventional wisdom about monotheism and about most other things that he interpreted, this explanation by itself cannot account for Freud's failure to speculate about the body of the father God. Indeed, the human father's sexual body is central to Freud's account of the Oedipus complex. There is an important tension and even contradiction in Freud's account of monotheism. He describes monotheism as discovering the image of the father that had earlier been disguised in the symbols of animals. But at the same time he claims that Moses introduced an intellectual/spiritual notion of God, an idea of God with no imaged content. Thus Freud's account of monotheism is contradictory: on the one hand he asserts that in monotheism the father is rediscovered behind the image of God; on the other hand he insists that what is discovered is a conceptual idea of God with no imaged content. Freud seems unaware of his conceptual leap from paternal image to the intellectual idea of God: "Freud does not seem to be aware that in talking about an abstract idea [of God] and instinctual renunciation he makes a major shift - at once descriptive, conceptual, logical, theoretical, and historical. The introduction of this new notion meant abandoning the beautifully built theory of object representation implicit in his previous formulations." In remaining unaware of this shift in his thinking, Freud provides no explanation for the banning of the father's image.
Ironically, Freud had all the theoretical resources to account for this disappearance of the father's body for he was well aware of the potential for homoerotic desire between father and son. Freud postulated an original bisexuality in the newborn that only later was organized along heterosexual lines through the Oedipus complex. But there were two versions of that complex. In one version, the one most familiar to readers and the one central to "Totem and Taboo" and "Moses and Monotheism," the male child desires his mother, and because of that desire becomes afraid of his father castrating him, an event Freud believed occurred repeatedly in history. Out of narcissistic attachment to his organ, a boy represses his desires for his mother so as to end the competition with his father. This is the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex. But Freud explored another variant on this process, what he called an "inverted' or "passive" Oedipus complex. In this version, the boy wished to be castrated so as to replace his mother and become the object of his father's affections. This desire to become a woman and take the female position was, if development was not arrested, surmounted for the same reason. The narcissistic connection to his penis helped the boy renounce this desire for his father, identifying with him instead and therefore taking a heterosexual love object. If for some reason these homosexual feelings became fixed, they could be the cause for paranoia or other disorders.
Freud's analysis of this case is based on Daniel Schreber's (1955) personal memoirs of his hospitalizations and treatments in two asylums written between 1900 and 1902. Schreber was a well respected Judge and at one point presiding judge of the superior court in Leipzig. During his hospitalization Schreber develops a detailed theology in which he imagines that God wishes him to be transformed into a woman. According to Schreber's theology, the soul is in the nerves of the body and after death returns to God who is made up of nerve alone. In returning to God, the soul-nerves go through a purification and gain a state of blessedness in which there is uninterrupted enjoyment combined with contemplation of God. A soul's happiness lies in continual reveling in pleasure. When describing his own transformation into a woman, Schreber refers to this as "soul voluptuousness." Schreber believes there is an upper and lower God. The rays of the lower God Ariman can "unman" human men.
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