Derrida realizes that Freud’s interest in the violent ori-
gins of the law is in the line of the Hebrew prophets rather than
the Egyptian scribes. Here Derrida forecasts his interest in
Plato’s Phaedrus,with its myth of the Egyptian invention of
writing (discussed next chapter). He writes, “God, the Egyp-
tians believed, had made man a gift of writing just as he in-
spired dreams. Interpreters, like dreams themselves, then had
only to draw upon the curiological or tropological storehouse.
They would readily find there the key to dreams, which they
would then pretend to divine” ( 208 ). In this passage, Derrida
makes dream interpretation among the ancient Egyptians
sound like a rather amiable con game, one controlled, like
writing itself, by a priestly sect. Perhaps, Derrida hints, psycho-
analysis resembles this Egyptian practice in its deck-stacking
priestcraft: a way of inventing the truth that it pretends to find,
a crooked divination. Derrida makes us wonder, for a mo-
ment, if he intends to class Freud among the Egyptians, the
deceptive readers of dreams (or at least to cast him as an am-
bitious Hebrew Joseph).
In turning from Egypt to ancient Israel, Derrida tacitly
admits that Freud is not a self-serving deceiver, intent merely
on finding what he wants in a dream or symptom. Though
stacking the deck is surely, at times, a key Freudian practice,
Freud was not the clever fraud that polemicists like Frederick
Crews accuse him of being. Rather than conveniently produc-
ing meaning, Freud submits to it and struggles with it. Like a
prophet, he announces the hard truth imposed on him. Freud
had a near-religious sense of his vocation. He was surrounded
by recalcitrant audiences ready to deny his claims to knowl-
edge and turn a deaf ear to his truths. Freud in his integrity,
like Moses and the prophets, bears the unavoidable Word.
In keeping with Freud’s harsh, exalted sense of his mes-
Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology 111