ABSTRACT
Professor Halperin has presented the case for psychoanalytic input to the study of old and ancient documents most persuasively. Professor Halperin mentions the terms “manifest content” and “latent content”— terms proposed by Freud for distinguishing the unconscious motivating impulse and fantasies of the dream (latent content), from the overt dream it (manifest content). The hypothetical adversarial scholar whom Halperin has created would have collected the sources of the images of the fantasy correctly. But these are not sufficient to “interpret” the fantasy or even to explain certain variants of the original images that are introduced into the text. Halperin’s selection has proved to be felicitous. But the optimal result would be obtained, not from alternating the historical-philological with the psychoanalytic approach, but from coordinating them. Halperin quotes Himmelfarb, who relates the fiery stream to the Mountain of El, mentioned in Ugaritic literature, at the base of which two streams run.
