The Tear of Blood – Moses and Monotheism

Salvador Dalí is best known for his unique Surrealistic vision of the world utilizing fantastic symbolism to create magnificent artworks. Dali’s artworks not only demonstrated his own dream-world, phobias and desires, but important episodes that influenced the artist’s life. Given lithograph depicts the fascination of Salvador Dali and the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Dali was intrigued by the theories of Freud, he had a large influence on the artist. In particular, Salvador Dali felt a strong relation to the Freud’s psychoanalitic theory, that claims that the human behavior results from the interplay of the three most important parts of the mind: id, ego, and superego.

Moses and Monotheism is a book written in 1939 by Sigmund Freud. The book consists of three essays and is an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a means of generating hypotheses about historical events. Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Hebrew, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist.

It shocked many of its readers because of Freud’s suggestion that Moses was actually born an Egyptian, rather than merely raised as an Egyptian.