Freud's major cultural books, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, have long been viewed as failed attempts at historical reconstruction. This book, by an anthropologist and practicing psychoanalyst, offers a brilliant reinterpretation of these works, presenting them instead as versions and unwitting analyses of the great mythic narrative underlying Judeo-Christian civilization, found principally in the Five Books of Moses. Synthesizing aspects of structural anthropology, symbolic anthropology, evolutionary theory, and psychoanalysis, Robert A. Paul reveals the numerous parallels between...