This article retrieves Freud’s Paul as a forgotten predecessor and untapped critic of the “return to Paul” in contemporary political theology and continental philosophy. Given that Sigmund Freud published Moses and Monotheism in 1939 having barely escaped from Vienna, the text’s reception has justly been dominated by the question of Freud’s identification with Moses and the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism. However, I argue that this narrow focus has obscured the more fundamental problem of the connection between religion and Freud’s enigmatic notion of “historical truth,” which he works out not through Moses but through Saint Paul. To do so, I first show how Freud’s genealogy of monotheism is modeled on the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms. I then trace how Freud deepens his investigation into the etiology of symptom-formation until he arrives at the notion of historical truth and the archaic heritage that transmits it. Lastly, I demonstrate that Freud presents himself less as a Pauline figure than he does Paul as a proto-analyst. Through this staging, I contend that Freud parochializes the claims of Christianity as symptomatic of a more archaic historical truth that psychoanalysis alone is able to access. Freud’s Paul demonstrates that it is not a question of whether but how ostensibly modern secular discourses inherit the theological traditions in which they are imbedded. Reading Freud as a philosopher of religion ultimately offers an indictment of any philosophy or emancipatory politics naively modeled on theological universalism.

本文将弗洛伊德的保罗作为被遗忘的前任，并对当代政治神学和大陆哲学中的“重返保罗”进行了未开发的批评。鉴于西格蒙德·弗洛伊德（Sigmund Freud）发表了《摩西与一神论》1939年，他几乎没有逃离维也纳，但文本的接受却主要受到弗洛伊德对摩西的认同以及精神分析与犹太教之间的关系的支配。但是，我认为，这种狭narrow的关注掩盖了宗教与弗洛伊德的“历史真相”这个神秘概念之间的联系这一更为根本的问题，他不是通过摩西而是通过圣保罗来解决这一问题。为此，我首先展示弗洛伊德一神教的族谱是如何建立在歇斯底里症状的发病机理上的。然后，我追踪弗洛伊德如何加深对症状形成的病因学的调查，直到他得出历史真相的概念以及传递这一事实的古老遗产。最后，我证明弗洛伊德把自己表现为保罗的人物要比保罗作为原型分析师的表现要少。通过这一阶段，我认为弗洛伊德将基督教的主张看成是狭义的，这是精神分析本身能够获得的更古老的历史真理的症状。弗洛伊德的保罗证明，这不是一个问题，而是现代世俗话语表面上如何继承其所嵌入的神学传统。将弗洛伊德读作宗教哲学家，最终提出了对任何天真的以神学普遍主义为模型的哲学或解放政治的起诉。