This chapter explores Freud’s publications on Biblical prophets in the new interdisciplinary journal Imago that Freud founded to specifically deal with non-medical applications of psychoanalysis. This chapter analyzes Freud’s anonymously published essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) anew as an extension of and a direct consequence of the disputations over Jung’s Jonah-type and Maeder’s teleological function of dreams. In his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, Freud would take up his defense in Rome, where Pope Leo X had excommunicated Luther in 1521. Disguised as “an untrained layman,” Freud sets up a new hermeneutical arena far from the site of Lutheran Biblical exegetics on Jonah and before the Catholic Renaissance master Michelangelo, an artist Jung claimed expressed the “Jonah-type” in his pietàs. Applying and parodying the aesthetic arguments Jung and Maeder utilized in their recent publicatins, Freud uses the trope of the “artless Jew” by shifting the dialogue from typological interpretations of stubborn Jewish prophets to German-language art historical interpretations of a Catholic representation of Moses.

This chapter maps five stages of the founding history of the psychoanalytic periodical enterprise, beginning with Freud’s pre-analytic phantasies around a journal, its social form, and unavoidable emotional content. Freud later nurtured a small group of followers expressly to establish a periodical and found the discourse on religion critical to the enterprise. With the arrival of competing periodicals on the scene, the use of religious rhetoric editors utilized the discourse on religion to narrate group dynamics within the Freudian circle and to enact change in the periodical enterprise itself. In is only in 1912 that religious content became a charged site in Christian-Jewish debates for working out contemporary rivalries and for marking out one’s territory. Jung and his circle began to abandon the analogic treatment of religion for the evidence that the history of religion could provide as the basis for their theoretical differences with Freud.