William Durand-Poor

On his deathbed in 1938, Sigmund Freud wrote his final, and in many ways his most original work.

But the most famous psychologist in history wasn't writing about the unconscious mind or the ego.

who is writing about the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten.

And he was asking whether Akhenaten's radical religious beliefs laid the seeds from which Judaism, Islam, and Christianity grew.

In this episode, we're going to be exploring that.

And we're welcoming to the studio.

I'm afraid it's just me today.

No, no, Anita.

She's busy.

But it gets me all the more time with one of my favorite authors who I have completely loved the work of.

Francesco Stavrakopoulos.

Welcome to the podcast.

So everyone put your seatbelts on because what you're going to get is certainly very different from what I understood to be the origins of monotheism, which is what we're looking at today.

We're asking two questions in a sense.

What was the beginnings of monotheism?

Was Akhenaten's Aten faith a form of monotheism or not?

We looked a bit at that with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, but we're going to go now forward with Francesca and ask a second question.

What are the origins of the cult of Yahweh?

And how far did Akhenaten's thought and ideas, which seemed to be so thoroughly smashed when we last looked in the last episode with the end of Telemanna and the abandonment of this entire world and the revolution, even by the time of Tutankhamen, his son, how much can we see the influence of that in what became the three great monotheistic Abrahamic religions?

So tell us about Freud, first of all.