Edward Said and Freud : the question of identity

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring Edward Said's motives in choosing Freud's Moses and Monotheism as a (pre)-text to his lecture on Freud and the Non-Europeans and his memoir Out of Place. In addition, the paper will contrapuntally address the question of verity and the undermining of the notion of "pure identity." In a postcolonial sense, my paper will uncover the "overlapping identities," if any, between Freud and Said in an attempt to resolve the paradox of "identity," be it national, religious, or ethnic in the "Middle Eastern" (con)-text. The displacement of Said's family and people, when he was still a young man, left powerful impacts on his personality. That influenced him in realizing the evils of colonial systems through, in part, remaking the life and works of Franz Fanon, and participating in establishing the so-called post colonial approaches in the transformation of the understanding of identity, exile and culture. Said's personality developed from (Orientalism) into a more universal humane identity, which made Tom Mitchell compare his ideas with the works of Goya.