Abstract

How do we explain consistencies in discourses about the past that transcend the different interests and experiences of their contributors? This paper explores the the problem of cultural transmission as it appears in Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud claims that that the residues of repressed pasts can be preserved in the life of the collectivity through means other than explicit transmission or even learning processes of imitation and repetition. These ciphered transits of collective memory pose the greatest challenge for subsequent theorists influenced by Freud, most importantly the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, whose reformulation of Freud's account as a theory of "cultural memory" the paper outlines and compares to elements in the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the founding father of contemporary work on collective memory.