ABSTRACT
Denoumént. How did Maimonides’ medieval ideas of concealing and revealing cast new literary understanding about the layers of meaning of the Bible: how did his new understanding shift his own writing, (from Mishneh Torah to Guide) and sling us forward to Freud. We see both Maimonides (and Bible) and Freud as embedding themselves in the genre of concealing/revealing the most meaningful aspects of our inner lives. We discuss the visual as a primary and more “primitive” manner of talking with ourselves and how there is degradation as we try to put these into words. We review four major contributions to understanding cognitive and emotional “preverbal” development: Piaget, Bowlby (attachment), Daniel Stern (four developing “selves”), and emotions research. We summarize by placing Freud in this genre of concealing/revealing: this puts this revolutionary thinker on the evolutionary path of narrative beginning at least with Maimonides, but possibly even with Maimonides’ understanding of Torah as concealed and revealed meanings. We discuss the universal aspects of the human mind that we have discovered by exploring the apparently particularist details of both Maimonides and Freud.
