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The two greatest defectors, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, had left him long before, along with Wilhelm Stekel. In the 19203 they were followed by Otto Rank (who proved to be suffering from manic-depressive psychosis that had gone unsuspected in the inner circle of analysts), by Wilhelm Reich, and finally by the fawning Ferenczi, whose lifelong emotional troubles were compounded at the end by pernicious anemia and organic brain damage. Through it all, Freud held firmly to the line he had laid down: "We have only one aim and one loyalty—to psychoanalysis." When Stekel big-heartedly attempted a late reconciliation, Freud turned a stony face to him. And when Adler died, the unforgiving Freud so far forgot his own Jewishness as to remark: "For a Jew boy out of a Viennese suburb, a death in Aberdeen is an unheard-of career in itself and a proof of how far he had got on. The world really rewarded him richly for his service in having contradicted psychoanalysis."
Freud made few contributions in later life to the actual practice of psychoanalysis or its adaptation in more conventional psychiatric treatment. While he wrote abundantly, much of his output dealt with analytic trivia, and the rest was in sweeping, philosophic terms—despite his prejudice against "philosophical convolutions."
Among his principal works in his last two decades were Civilization and Its Discontents, a rambling, chatty discourse on everything from man's place in the universe to the fear of losing love, and Moses and Monotheism. Freud was convinced that Moses was no Jew, but a highborn Egyptian who chose the Jews (hence "the chosen people") as the instrument for perpetuating Akhnaton's monotheism, which had just been swept out of Egypt in a religious counterrevolution. Freud, who regarded religion as a "universal obsessional neurosis," was at pains to explain the acceptance of Moses and of his one God in terms of the "father figure." Comments Author Jones: "Freud had always asserted the psychological truth in religion, i.e., that it was concerned with real unconscious conflicts present in everyone. In this book he laid special stress on the historical truth in religion, i.e., that it was concerned with the unconscious memory of actual happenings." The intriguing point (not acknowledged by Loyalist Jones) about Freud's religious theorizing: it is reminiscent of the "archetypes" in Jung's psychology, which is roundly denounced by most Freudians.