Dilnoza Bekmurodova Navruzbekovna Student of the Presidential School in Karshi, Kashkadarya Region, Uzbekistan Email address: dilnozabekmurodova89@gramil.com
Abstract This article discusses the importance of choosing the right career in human life. It focuses on the social, psychological, and personal factors that influence career choice and highlights why this decision is crucial for young people. The article emphasizes the significance of aligning one’s interests and abilities to find a meaningful path, analyzes the consequences of poor career decisions, and explores how the right career choice leads to success and personal fulfillment. In the modern world, career choice has become one of the most decisive factors not only for individual happiness but also for social and economic development.
Introduction One of the most important decisions in a person’s life is choosing a career. Every individual defines their future, social standing, and success through their professional path. Therefore, the right career choice plays a crucial role not only in one’s personal life but also in the development of society as a whole. Today, with the rapid advancement of technology, the digital economy, and artificial intelligence, the global labor market is changing dramatically. New professions are emerging, while many traditional ones are gradually disappearing. In this context, it is vital for young people to choose careers that align with both modern demands and their own interests.
Thus, making the right career choice means consciously building one’s future, realizing personal potential, and taking responsibility for one’s own life. A career is not only a means of earning a living but also a way of self-discovery, achieving dreams, and contributing to social progress.
Main Body Research shows that the number of people dissatisfied with their professions or working in fields that do not match their abilities is increasing worldwide. Statistical data indicates that about 66% of workers have career regrets — mostly due to poor career choices, lack of motivation, and job dissatisfaction — which often lead to stress, burnout, and decreased productivity. Many people make incorrect career decisions early in life and end up working in areas that do not bring them fulfillment. Therefore, proper career selection has become not only a personal necessity but also a social priority.
Studies also suggest that individuals who choose careers aligned with their interests and strengths are 70% more satisfied with their jobs and demonstrate up to 1.5 times higher productivity. This shows that self-awareness is the key factor in successful career planning. A person must understand their talents, passions, and values to evaluate which professional path best fits them. For instance, creative individuals often thrive in art, design, or media fields, while analytical thinkers may excel in technology or scientific research.
Labor market demand also plays a critical role. According to the Future of Jobs Report 2025, the most in-demand professions in the coming years will include artificial intelligence and data analysis experts, software developers, environmental specialists, cybersecurity professionals, and healthcare workers. Meanwhile, automation is leading to the gradual decline of roles such as cashiers, clerical staff, and data entry operators. This transformation highlights the necessity for individuals to adapt, reskill, and continuously develop new competencies to remain competitive.
Gender-based differences also remain a major issue in the global job market. Current data reveals that 72% of men participate in the workforce, compared to only 47% of women. This gap underscores the need to ensure equal opportunities and promote women’s education and professional development. Research shows that when women’s participation in the workforce increases, a country’s GDP and overall economic growth also rise significantly.
To choose the right career, individuals should follow several essential steps. First, self- assessment is necessary to identify personal strengths, values, and areas of interest. Second, one should research current and future labor market trends to understand which professions offer stability and growth. Gaining practical experience through internships, volunteer work, and mentorship programs is also vital to test one’s abilities in real-world settings. Moreover, consulting career counselors and taking personality or career aptitude tests (such as Holland’s or MBTI) can help make informed decisions.
In today’s world, success depends on continuous learning, flexibility, and adaptability. As new technologies reshape industries, traditional professions are disappearing while new ones emerge. Therefore, individuals must choose careers not only for today but also for the future. When personal interests, social needs, and market demands intersect, a person achieves both material success and emotional fulfillment.
Conclusion In conclusion, choosing the right career is one of the most important and responsible decisions in life. A well-chosen profession leads to psychological stability, financial independence, and overall life satisfaction. Conversely, a poor career choice can result in unemployment, stress, and dissatisfaction. Therefore, career decisions should be made thoughtfully—through self-reflection, experience, and awareness of future opportunities.
In the modern world, the greatest wealth is adaptability and lifelong learning. When individuals find their true path, they not only shape their own destiny but also contribute to the prosperity and progress of society.
Dilnoza Bekmurodova Navroʻzbekovna – 13 years old, born on January 31, 2012. Currently, she is a 7th grade student at the Presidential School in Karshi, Kashkadarya region, Republic of Uzbekistan. Dilnoza is interested in writing poetry, reading books, drawing, and making things. She has been interested in creativity since the age of seven, and has been writing poems and various creative works. Currently, her creative works have been published in several international magazines. One of her biggest dreams for the future is to open her own educational center, travel to many countries, and publish her author’s works. She is very interested in learning languages, and currently knows two more languages.
References
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World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025: Jobs of the Future and Skills You Need to Get Them. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/01/future-of-jobs-report-2025
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Inc. Magazine. (2025). Why 99 Percent of People Choose the Wrong Career Path. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com
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Bukhara State University (BuxDU). (2025). Modern Approaches to Professional Orientation.
My longing for you I miss you My mind is on you, my heart is on you, my love I long for a smiling face at dawn I see you every day in my dreams My eyes are on you, my heart is on you, my longing is on you Shining like a mirror in the darkness.
Playing with pleasure around the fire Wrapping around my neck like ivy.
I miss your beautiful eyes, which I call my love.
Flowing like a river from above As each refreshing drop falls into my heart As each phrase caresses my heart I miss your tongue dripping with honey.
Every day I watch you from afar I become a bee and wander from flower to flower. I wait for your rose scent in the wind I miss the rose that blooms on your cheeks.
KEMAL BERK Biography: I was born in 1955 in the Sungurlu district of Çorum province, Turkey. I attended primary, secondary, and high school in Sungurlu. I completed my university education at Ankara Gazi Education Institute. I began teaching in 1978 and retired in 2016. I am married with three children and four grandchildren. In addition to my professional life, I continued teaching Turkish folk dances, which began during my student years, and taught them to hundreds of students. We participated in festivals, opening ceremonies, and competitions, and won awards. I took special art courses, learning 3D painting techniques, and creating paintings. I took a course for the hearing impaired, learning how to communicate with people with hearing impairments. For two years, I attended special gastronomy courses and learned to prepare various meat dishes, vegetable dishes, desserts, pastries, and buns. Preparing and serving these dishes gives me peace of mind. I volunteer at AFAD, which provides aid in disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, and landslides.
YOSHLAR TILI VA INTERNET SLENGINING O’ZGARISHI THE CHANGES OF THE YOUTH LANGUAGE AND INTERNET
SLANG
Muallif:
Ushbu maqolada yoshlar tili va internet slengining hozirgi davrdagi o’zgarishlari lingvistik nuqtayi nazardan tahlil qilinadi. Internet ijtimoiy tarmoqlar, bloglar va ommaviy axborot vositalari orqali yoshlar tili va madaniyatiga bevosita ta’sir ko’rsatmoqda. Maqolada slengning paydo bo’lish sabablari, ularning leksik-semantik va pragmatik xususiyatlari, shuningdek, yoshlarning nutq madaniyatidagi o’zgarishlar misollar va faktlar asosida ko’rib chiqiladi.
ABSTRACT The article analyzes the linguistic changes in youth language and internet slang in modern era. The internet, social networks, blogs, and mass media directly influence youth language and cultures. The article examines the causes of slang emergence, its lexical-semantic and pragmatic features, as well as changes in youth speech culture based on examples and and facts.
KALIT SO’ZLAR Yoshlar tili, internet slengi, lingvistika, kommunikatsiya, zamonaviy til o’zgarishlari.
KEYWORDS Youth language, internet slang, linguistics, communication, modern language changes.
KIRISH Hozirgi globallashuv davrida internet yoshlar hayotining ajralmas qismiga aylangan. Bu esa til tizimida yangi birliklarning, ya’ni sleng so’zlarning keng qo’llanishiga sabab bo’lmoqda. Internet slengi o’zining qisqaligi, ifodaviyligi va
ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ НАУКА И ИННОВАЦИОННЫЕ ИДЕИ В МИРЕ
https://scientific-jl.org/obr Выпуск журнала No-81 Часть–2_ Ноябрь–2025
349
2181- 3187 yangilik yaratishga moyilligi bilan ajralib turadi. Til o’zgarishi tabiiy jarayon bo’lib, u avlodlar tafovutini ham aks ettiradi.
INTRODUCTION In the current era of globalization, the internet has become an integral part of youth life. This has lead to the emergence and widespread use of new linguistics units known as slang. Internet slang is characterized by brevity, expressiveness and creativity. Language change is a natural process that reflects generational differences.
ASOSIY QISM Yoshlar tili – bu muayyan ijtimoiy guruh vakillari tomonidan ishlatiladigan, o’ziga xos leksik, fonetik va grammatik xususiyatlarga ega nutq shaklidir. Internetning rivojlanishi yoshlar tili uchun yangi imkoniyatlar yaratdi.”Telegram “,” Instagram “, “TikTok “ kabi platformalarda yangi so’z va iboralar paydo bo’lib, tez tarqalmoqda. Masalan, “cringe “,” sus”, “based “,” cap”, “noob”, “vibe”, “mood”, “flex” kabi so’zlar o’zbek yoshlarining tilida keng qo’llanmoqda. Fakt sifatida shuni ko’rsatish mumkinki, O’zbekiston yoshlari orasida olib borilgan so’rovnomalar 70%dan ortiq ishtirokchilar har kuni sleng so’zlardan foydalanishini bildirgan. Bu esa internet tili yoshlar orasida ommaviy axborot quroliga aylanganini ko’rsatadi. Shuningdek, ingliz tilidan kirib kelayotgan neologizmlar morfologik moslashuv orqali o’zbek tiliga singmoqda.
MAIN PART Youth language is a speech form used by specific social groups with distinct lexical, phonetic, and grammatical characteristics. The development of the internet has opened new opportunities for youth communication. Platforms such as Telegram, Instagram and TikTok generate and spread new words rapidly. For example, words like “cringe”, “sus”, “based”, “cap”, “noob”, “vibe”, and “flex”, have entered the daily speech of Uzbek youth. Research shows that over 70%of Uzbek youth use slang words daily. This indicates that the internet language has become a dominant means of youth communication. Furthermore, English neologisms are being morphologically adapted into the Uzbek language, showing linguistic flexibility and integration.
XULOSA
ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ НАУКА И ИННОВАЦИОННЫЕ ИДЕИ В МИРЕ
https://scientific-jl.org/obr Выпуск журнала No-81 Часть–2_ Ноябрь–2025
350
2181- 3187 Internet va texnologiya taraqqiyoti natijasida yoshlar tili doimiy ravishda o’zgarib bormoqda. Bu o’zgarishlar ijobiy jihatdan tilni boyitsa, salbiy tomondan adabiy me’yorlardan chetlanishga sabab bo’lmoqda. Linguistlar uchun asosiy vazifa – bu jarayonni ilmiy jihatdan kuzatish va yangi birliklarning tizimliligi hamda madaniy ta’sirini o’rganishdir.
CONCLUSION As a result of technological progress, youth language continues to evolve. These changes enrich the language but may also lead to deviation from literary norms. For linguists, the main task is to observe this process scientifically and analyze the systematic and cultural impact of new linguistic units.
FOYDALANILGAN ADABIYOTLAR 1.O’zbek tilida internet slengining leksik innovatsiyasi haqida maqola. 2.Slengning kommunikativ funksiyalari, yoshlar jamiyatida kod tili sifatidagi roli. (researchgate.net) 3.O’zbek tilida yoshlarning ijtimoiy lahjasi va sleng birliklari.(grnjournal.us)
REFERENCES 1.Digital Slang as a Modern form of lexical innovation (academicpublishers.org)
Youth slang as a social language code :functions and formation. (researchgate.net) 3.Youth sociolect in Uzbek(gr journal.us)
In a place where the sun rose beautifully, a little camomile flower lived. But this camomile was not ordinary. It was magical. If someone made a wish with a true and kind heart, the camomile could make it come true.
Very few people knew this secret.One day, a little girl came near the camomile. She wanted to pick it and place it in her hair, but something made her stop. She felt the flower might be sad if she did that. So she sat down beside it, gently touched its soft petals, and said, It would be wonderful if there were some food right now.
Suddenly, food appeared in front of her. At first, she looked around, thinking someone was watching her, but there was no one. She smiled and began to eat. Then she said, Would you like to taste some? The camomile replied, No, I dont need any. I will be happy if you are happy.The girl understood she had found real magic.
From that day on, the camomile stayed with her and helped her whenever she made a heartfelt wish.
Story by Asmonur Rajabboyeva
English Translation by Shuxratova Nilufar
Shuxratova Nilufar Azizbek qizi was born on March 31, 2013, in Uchqo‘rg‘on district of Namangan region. She received her primary education at Secondary School No. 31 in her district. Currently, she continues her studies at the Is’hoqxon Ibrat Creative School in To‘raqo‘rg‘on district.Despite her young age, Nilufar has achieved a number of accomplishments before the age of 12. As a young translator, she has been translating many short stories from Uzbek into English. Through each new translation, she not only improves her language skills but also develops her creative thinking and literary abilities.
One of Nilufar’s greatest dreams is to become a student of Harvard University, one of the world’s most prestigious higher education institutions. From an early age, she has been strengthening her love for knowledge, language learning, reading, and creativity, moving steadily and determinedly toward her goal.Her teachers and relatives describe her as an intelligent, hardworking, inquisitive, and highly responsible girl. Each achievement Nilufar attains is a strong step toward her future great successes.
FROM FIRST TO LAST: THE CASE OF THE TURKISH TURNCOAT
The 20th century was born, psychologically speaking, with the 1900 publication of Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Out of this book, psychoanalysis quickly matured into a bold, contentious philosophy, ready and able to challenge the basic tenets of many disciplines. Freud and most of his early followers were Jews, but their precepts and even their mood were so radically different from those of rival schools of thought that the ultimate antecedents of psychoanalysis remain a mystery despite various attempts to trace its genealogy.
Some four decades after “The Interpretation of Dreams” appeared, Immanuel Velikovsky, one of Freud’s professional colleagues, published a comprehensive reinterpretation of the origins of psychoanalysis. “The Dreams Freud Dreamed” appeared in “Psychoanalytic Review” 28 (Oct. 1941). In Velikovsky’s analysis Freud’s own dreams — the foundation of all that came later — dealt with “his inner struggle for unhampered advancement: In order to get ahead he would have to conclude a Faust-pact: he would have to sell his soul to the Church.”
Velikovsky employed Freud’s own psychoanalytic methods to uncover Freud’s hidden motives. He examined 16 of Freud’s dreams, 10 of them in great detail; in his understanding, all of them contained evidence of the same internal conflict. But one of the dreams included an important element which Velekovsky admitted he could not readily fit into his general scheme, though he should have been able to do so.
Velikovsky called the episode the “Dream About the Woman in the Kitchen and the Stranger.” In Freud’s account the dream ended this way:
“I want to put on an overcoat; but the first I try on is too long. I take it off, and am somewhat astonished to find that it is trimmed with fur. A second coat has a long strip of cloth with a Turkish design sewn into it. A stranger with a long face and short, pointed beard comes up and prevents me from putting it on, declaring that it belongs to him. I now show him that it is covered all over with Turkish embroideries. He asks: ‘How do the Turkish (drawings, strips of cloth…) concern you?’ But we soon become quite friendly.” [tr. A. A. Brill]
Velikovsky interpreted that section of the dream as follows:
“We know that a stranger in a dream is usually the father…. Likewise the overcoat which is too large (Jews wear long overcoats) is that of the father. He is surprised in the dream ‘that the coat is trimmed with fur’. Eight pages earlier the story of the father’s fur cap which was thrown into the mud by a Christian is told…. He tries on a Jewish coat (trimmed with fur, father’s religion) and afterwards a foreign (Turkish) one. Why ‘Turkish’ was chosen for foreign I can not say definitely without the assitance of the necessary associations. But Viennese history considers the Turk especially as the foreigner.”
Even as Velikovsky was completing the article, Freud was dying, so his own associations with “Turkish” are lost to us forever. In the article itself Velikovsky specifically warned against analysts making arbitrary associations on behalf of analysands. However, an interdisciplinary approach may succeed where a more specialized one lacks sufficiant information to make a proper evaluation.
A year before Velikovsky was examining Freud’s psychic pattern, Gershom G. Scholem, the first professor of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbala at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, (and, incidentally, the husband of a distant relative of Freud) had come to the startling conclusion that the 19th-century process of Jewish enlightenment and assimilation to European society owed its impetus to a 17th-century heresy named after Sabbatai Zevi (1625-1676). A member of the Sephardic community in Smyrna (modern Izmir, Turkey), at an early age he became imbued with the Kabbalistic teachings of Isaac Luria, a prominent mystic of the previous century. However, he transformed Luria’s arcane teachings into a radical popular movement. As Scholem wrote,
“Sabbatianism represents the first serious revolt in Judaism since the Middle Ages; it was the first case of mystical ideas leading directly to the disintegration of the orthodox Judaism of ‘the believers’. Its heretical mysticism produced an outburst of more or less veiled nihilistic tendencies among some of its followers. Finally it encouraged a mood of religious anarchism on a mystical basis which, where it coincided with favorable external circumstances, played a highly important part in creating a moral and intellectual atmosphere favorable to the reform movement of the nineteenth century.”
As early as 1648 Zevi publicly uttered God’s mystical full name, an act which many devotees interpreted as revealing himself as the long-awaited Messiah. Driven from Smyrna by the horrified rabbis, he spent several years abroad before he returned home in 1665 to proclaim that the next year would signal the beginning of Jewish redemption. From Smyrna he proceeded to Constantinople in order to “depose” the Osmanli sultan. Mehmed IV’s initial response was to remove a nuisance by imprisoning Zevi at Abydos. However, the prison became transformed into a place of pilgrimage. To head off possible unrest the sultan threatened to execute the Messiah unless he publicly converted to Islam. Thus, as “Mehmet Effendi,” Zevi accepted a sinecure at the Turkish court before being banished to Albania, where he died in obscurity.
Humiliated and degraded by Zevi’s apostasy, his followers sought some sort of rationalization for the act. It thus came to symbolize a radical paradox, a mystical form of redemption. They were supported in their interpretation by the experience of the Maranos, Jews who had “converted” to Christianity in the 15th century as an alternative to expulsion from Spain but who continued to practice their ancient rites in secret.
The movement was revived in an especially radical form a century later by Jakub Frank (c.1726-1791), a rabbi’s son who claimed to be a reincarnation of both Zevi and the patriarch Jacob. The Jewish authorities in Poland expelled him due to his heretical doctrines including the deification of himself as a part of a trinity and his denial of the traditional opposition between good and evil. He incorporated sexual practices into his teachings and advocated “purification through transgression,” regarding participation in all forms of behavior as a means of liberation. The Sabbatians informed the bishop of Kamenetz-Podolsk that they rejected the Talmud and recognized only the Zohar, the sacred book of Kabbalah, which did not contradict the Christian doctrine of the trinity. Then Frank claimed that he had recieved a heavenly revelation calling on his adherents to adopt the “religion of Edom” (Christianity) as a transition to the true religion (which he called das, “knowledge’) to be revealed later. In 1759 the Frankists were baptized in Lwów, with members of the Polish szlachta (nobility) acting as godparents; the neophytes adopted their surnames and joined their ranks, and king Augustus III served as Frank’s own godfather. By 1790, 26,000 Jews in Poland converted. (Isaac Bashevis Singer vividly presented a picture of the movement in Poland in his first novel, “Satan in Goray.”) Nevertheless, Frank was arrested for heresy in 1760 and imprisoned in the monastery of Częstochowa, though his influence continued to grow. After the first partition of Poland he was released by the Russian military in 1803 and frequently traveled to Vienna, where empress Maria Theresa regarded him as a disseminator of Christianity among the Jews. Ultimately, Frank and his retinue moved to Germany, where he adopted the title “Baron von Frank” of Offenbach.
The Frankist leader in Prague, Jonas Wehle (1752-1823), intellectually linked Luria and Zevi with Moses Mendessohn and Immanuel Kant; Aaron Chorin (1766-1844), the founder of Reform Judaism in Hungary, a former member of a Sabbatian group in Prague, ordained his protege Leopold Loew (1811-1875), who the first to deliver his sermons in Magyar; Loew specifically attributed a large role in rationalist propaganda and encouragement to the Sabbatians.
The defenders of rabbinical orthodoxy did everything they could to ridicule, destroy, and belittle the importance of the heresy, though Scholem pointed out that “various moderate forms” existed “in which orthodox piety and Sabbatian belief existed side by side, and the number of more or less outstanding rabbis who were secret adherents of the new sectarian mysticism was far larger than orthodox apologists have ever been willing to admit.” The belief became particularly influential among traders and manufacturers, who helped promote a mood that led to a basic reorientation of Jewish culture. In this respect, at least, the Sabbatians were like some Christian sectarians, such as the Quakers and Anabaptists, who, according to Scholem, “created an atmosphere in which the rationalist movement, in spite of its very different origins, was enabled to grow and develop, so that in the end both worked in the same direction.”
Scholem also sketched some of the links he saw between Sabbatiansism and more modern aspects of Jewish culture, in particular its relation to the origins of the Jewish Enlightenment and Hasidism (while at the same time denouncing the view that Hasidism was the impetus for emancipation as a “romantic misconception”). The founder of the Hasidist movement, Israel Ben Eliezer Ba’al Shem Tov (“Besht,” c. 1700-1760) may have been a participant in the disputations between Frank and the Christians, and many of his early followers were probably Sabbatians; he derived much of his own mytical inspiration from moderate Sabbatians such as Joshua Heshel Zoref (1633-1700).
In “The Slayers of Moses,” Susan A Handelman of the University of Maryland noted that Scholem investigated “what had been consigned to what Scholem calls the ‘cellar’ of Jewish history…. But a cellar is also the foundation of the house….” University of Missouri psychology professor David Bakan had already added a new wing to the house that Scholem built. In “Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” he claimed that “Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularized Jewish mysticism; and psychoanalysis can intelligently be viwed as such a secularization… By separating the supernatural elements in mysticism from its other content, Freud succeeded in making a major contribution to science.”
In a general sense, according to Bakan, Jewish mystical thought was “in the air” throughout Eastern Europe, even to the extent of being embodied in “the common oral expressions” of the Jews. But Freud’s biography specifically links him to some expressions of the mystical thought endemic to the middle of the 19th century. He was born in Moravia, one of the Western strongholds of Sabbatianism. (After his imprisonment, Frank had lived in the Moravian town of Brno until 1786.) The other branch of his family had migrated to Romania, another Sabbtian hotbed, but maintained close communication with Freud’s family; in 1886 one of his sisters married one of her Romanian relatives. Both of Freud’s parents came from areas that were strongly Hasidic; his father was born in Tysmenite, an early asimilationist community which openly espoused the cause of Polish nationalism, and his mother’s family was from Brody, which had been famous as a great anti-Frankist center in the late 18th century before becoming a Hasidic community and a prime area of diffusion in the areas affected by the Berlin Enlightenment.
Freud’s wife also had an interesting background. At the urging of her brother, who was already married to Freud’s sister, she broke tradition by breaking her engagement to another man she did not love. Her grandfather had been a well-known Hamburg rabbi who was vociferously opposed to the Reformers’ repudiation of messianic beliefs (and had been the object of a polemic written by Noah Mannheim, a Reformist rabbi who had performed the wedding ceremony for Freud’s parents); the grandfather was described by Meyer Waxman as “a queer and eccentric personality and his philosophy of Judaism was full of mystic vagaries, some of which were contrary and foreign to the true Jewish spirit.” One of his sons, Freud’s wife’s uncle, had converted to Christianity and obtained an important position at the court of Ludwig I of Bavaria.
Given these circumstances, Freud must have grown up and matured in a milieu of Hasidistic and perhaps even crypto-Sabbatianist mysticism. As an adult he exhibited many traits that are associated with Frankist beliefs. He was fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage (for instance in his praise for Hannibal of Carthage as a Semitic hero), even though he completely rejected its religious beliefs and even though he sometimes dissembled about some of his Jewish connections in order to protect his ideas from racially motivated criticism. Like the Sabbatians, he opposed the orthodox creed while elaborating his own rival set of myths; he may have thus regarded himself as a sort of secular messianic figure. He was indefatigable in his search for intimate knowledge of the forbidden areas of behavior, especially those concerning sex, and in his belief that reality may be apprehended by the intellect.
In a particularly interesting passage, Bakan made an extended comparison of Freud’s presentation of the “dream of Irma’s injection” with the techniques used in the “Zohar.” He also relied heavily on a 1933 Velikovsky article, which traced the seeds of psychoanalytic dream interpretation to very early Jewish texts.
One of the major planks in Bakan’s construction was his interpretation of Freud’s final book, “Moses and Monotheism.” In Velikovsky’s words its theses were “that Moses was an Egyptian prince, a pupil of Akhnaton; that Akhnaton was the founder of montheistic idealism; that when Akhnaton ceased to rule and his schism fell into disfavor, Moses preserved his teachings by bringing them to the slaves, with whom he left Egypt.” Thus its entire purpose was to deprive Jews of Judaism itself. According to Bakan, it was a Kabbalistic work, fearfully written with deliberate obscurity as a book with a double content. “It is, by any of the usual criteria used to evaluate books, incredibly bad. Some of the followers of Freud have tended to dismiss it; and, by some, it is regarded as the product of senility…. If this book had not come from the hand of Sigmund Freud, one would seriously doubt whether it would ever have seen the light of day.” Nevertheless, the book “expresses some of his deepest impulses, impulses which were operative throughout his life. The book is the only one written by Freud which directs itself avowedly to the problem of Judaism and the meaning of being Jewish.”
In an anonymous article, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” written many years earlier, Freud had symbolically transformed the prophet into a gentile by being the subject of a papal funerary statue. This urge was carried to its ultimate expression a quarter century later, in what would in effect be his last will and testament. In Bakan’s analysis, both Zevi and Frank became gentiles; thus, the “ultimate fulfillment of the theme of Sabbatianism is to have Moses, the most profound Messianic figure of Judaism and the image of all other Messiahs, already be Gentile…. By converting Moses into a Gentile, Freud committed his psychological act of apostasy.”
Bakan shrank from stating baldly that Freud was a secret adept of some esoteric sect. “An image of him poring over Kabbalistic books in the dead of night is not supported by the facts; although to have done this would not have been inconsistent with the patterns of the Jewish mystical leaders.” But Bakan’s contention that Freud may have been motivated by some deep-seated knowledge of Kabbalistic lore, even if that knowledge were second-hand, leads us back to Velikovsky’s efforts to unravel Freud’s psyche.
Many years after “The Dreams Freud Dreamed,” Velikovsky recalled that the catalyst for his own reinterpretation of Jewish (and other) texts as accounts of planetary cataclysmic disruption was in fact “Moses and Monotheism”:
“I disagreed with Freud and saw in the octogenarian a still-unresolved conflict with respect to his Jewish origin and his own father. I turned to his dreams to know more about him than his books could tell. I found that his own dreams … spoke a language that was very clear but had meaning which Freud did not comprehend — or did not reveal to his readers. All the dreams dealt with the problem of his Jewish origin, the tragic fate of his people, his deliberations on leaving the ranks of the persecuted for the sake of unhampered advancement — or at least in order to free his children from the fate of under-privileged Jews in Christian and anti-Semitic Vienna.”
Although the dream symbolism may have had a Catholic origin because of the local social pressure to convert to that particular faith, the essential struggle was whether or not to become a gentile. The most famous, or infamous, example of becoming a gentile for opportunistic reasons was, of course, Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion, a drama that was of immense importance to Jewish culture. Zevi was widely condemned as a sort of bogey man. (For example, Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, was often called “a new Sabbatai Levi” by his anti-Zionist opponents.) Zevi, of course, achieved his unsavory reputation by publicly donning the coat that “was covered all over with Turkish enbroideries.”
Furthermore, on the basis of the manifest content of the dream, the conflict that Velikovsky described may have been a recurring, familial, one. After all, the father would have grown up in a Hasidistic town at the very time the Jewish Enlightenment was gaining ground. The stranger in the dream (the father, in Velikovsky’s analysis) at first insists that the Turkish coat belongs to him and then rather belligerently wants to know how the Turkish designs concern the dream-Freud. Perhaps it was those very same heretical beliefs that allowed the two, father and son, to become “quite friendly.”
If, as Bakan believed, “Moses and Monotheism” was an essentially Kabbalistic book, some of the volumes that Velikovsky himself wrote may also be re-illuminated. Velikovsky admitted that he began researching the unfinished “Freud and His Heroes” in response to the “Moses” book; out of that research grew, inadvertantly, all of Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” and “Ages in Chaos” concepts of recurring gloabal catastrophes.
Velikovsky left his medical practice in Palestine to coduct research that would refute the central thesis of Freud’s final production. In his imaginative, painstaking reconstruction of ancient history, Velikovsky fixed the creed of Moses hundreds of years before Akhnaton’s religious innovations rather than some few years afterwards.
But in addition to being an important negative catalyst, “Moses and Monotheism” also proved to be a powerful positive influence on Velikovsky, who applied many of Freud’s conclusions and methods to his own reconstruction. A few examples may suggest the strength of Freud’s work on Velikovsky’s:
1) Imaginative use of philology. Freud made much of his identification of Aten (in Egyptian) with Adonis (in Syrian) and Adonai (in Hebrew). Velikovsky’s uses of phonetic similarity were legion; two instances will suffice: He compared the Maruts (“the terrible ones”) in the Vedas with the terrible one (“Ariz”) in the books of Joel and Isaiah and then proceeded to associate these words with the Romans’ Mars and the Greeks’ Ares; he also made an elaborate comparison between the legendary Chinese god/king Yahou, the Biblical deity Yahweh, the Mexican war god Yao, and the Roman sky god Jove, further linking the sounds of their names with various religious chants around the world.
2) Explanation of the origin of anti-Semitism. Freud suggested that other people were jealous of the Jews’ claim to be “the first-born, favourite child of God the Father;” Velikovsky went somewhat further, insisting that it was not mere jealousy — it was fear and resentment that “the great catastrophe of tribulations, destructions and paroxysms of nature … was caused for the benefit of the sons of Israel.”
3) Existence, cause, and effects of phylogenetic memory. After a period of initial resistance, the Jews eventually accepted monotheism. This is how Freud explained the phenomenon:
“Early trauma — defence — latency — outbreak of neurotic illness — partial return of the repressed. Such is the formula which we have laid down for the development of a neurosis. The reader is now invited to take the step of supposing that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of individuals: of supposing, that is, that here too events occurred … which left behind them permanent consequences but were for the most part fended off and forgotten, and which after a long latency came into effect and created phenomena similar to symptoms on their structure and purpose.” Freud thus insisted that certain experiences are transmitted to one’s descendants. Velikovsky did not emphasize the sexual nature of those experiences but held that repeated, universal catastrophes left their memory traces, particularly in how we interpret the evidence of those catastrophes.
4) Myth as history. Freud synchronized the Homeric epics with the time in which “the return of the religion of Moses was in preparation among the Hebrews” and proposed that the early Greeks had experienced a period of prehistoric “cultural effloresence which had perished in a historical catastrophe and of which an obscure tradition survived.” Apparently he had in mind some sort of local catastrophe, perhaps of a social or economic nature. Velikovsky of course postulated a series of global destructions and correlated Ikhnaton with Oedipus.
5) Universality of historical accounts. Freud predicted that scientists would eventually be able to verify the same factors underlying the national epics of the Germans, the Finns, and other ancient peoples. He also claimed that the cause of these epics had disappeared before the arrival of Alexander the Great, who lamented that he had no Homer to immortalize his deeds. Velikovsky used historical and legendary accounts, as well as mythological motifs and other sources, to reorder the course of world history from the Exodus onwards but accepted that post-Alexandrine chronolgies were correct.
On the face of it, Velikovsky was probably even less likely than Freud to have been a “closet mystic.” However, Velikovsky’s father had been an early Russian Zionist-assimilationist. Velikovsky was apparently rather indifferent about his religious heritage but was extremely interested in and proud of his people’s cultural traditions and history. He had been the author of a very suggestive article on the Talmudists’ use of word play in dream interpretation, and he developed a very sophisticated technique for using word play in his own psychiatric practice. However, it is not my intent to suggest that he was a Kabbalist, only that he, like Freud, may have been influenced by Kabbalist thought more than he was perhaps aware.
the delicate thrum, heartbeat through my bound chest, my palm pressed there like a promise, every breath stolen from me like a murmuration of living feeling seeing i’m living in the stars like a superhero. only now.
only now does the murmuration of my heartbeat slow, the murmuration of birds slow their pace. i’ve been taught to exist without realizing.. the gentle murmurs of your heart have become a gift.
i didn’t realize i missed you until i stood under the sky with the world opened up to me and i murmuredation, please come home. we are both home.
if we are both home then why do i feel lost? when my mom told me it wasn’t a panic attack
all i wanted was you. your delicate murmuration thrumming through my bones. your comfort. when i picture you i feel safe. i watch birds and i feel like i’m floating away. i could take off in search of them but i think you’d notice.
i hope so. i notice every murmuration, we are a murmuration, aren’t we? a flock of birds, we rise, we fall, i missed you you you it’s hard to realize i missed you until i see you
and you say you missed me and i say it back and i feel right again, not just a stolen wish floating away to a star-ling.
The day we laid that cold crust of earth over your body, something in me went missing. I watched the people crying around the grave and couldn’t understand why they mourned someone they saw perhaps once a year. Then I looked at my mother. Silent, glittering in her overdressed elegance, as if she wanted you to envy her for still being alive. Perhaps it was her revenge for all those years spent chasing your approval and failing. After she divorced you, she drifted away from me too. I only wish it had happened sooner; her presence or absence never changed much.
Back home, the smell of grass and that fog-soaked cemetery settled in my mind. Objects lost themselves in that inner fog. I hunted for keys already in my pocket. In the narrow hallway between our two rooms, tasks slipped from my memory, and every cup of coffee went cold. Food tasted dull. I checked the stove, the doors, the water taps over and over. I fought life so hard that numbness wrapped itself around me. I went to bed exhausted and woke even more worn, my body nothing but bruised fatigue.
When the routine finally defeated me, the real battle began: the one inside. First came denial, the refusal to admit the weight of your absence. Then collapse. I cried, but the wound in my soul stayed hollow. And so, I began to write. The very work you never wanted for me. Not for you, who are gone and will remain gone, but for the version of you still living inside me.
I built stories about you, replayed memories. Then I realized the one inside me was not you at all. He was the father I had wanted. His face resembled yours through a softening veil of mist, but he was kind. He didn’t wait for me to fail. He didn’t frown or correct or sigh in disappointment. His small, cutting smiles were gone. I found memories that had never existed. In one, I had made a mistake, and the imagined you placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. You consoled me. Praised me. Forgave me. Touched me with a tenderness I had never known. Father.
Then, as if waking abruptly, another battle began. The first fight was with you. I pictured your aged body in the garden, the small red trowel in your hand. I sat you across from me on a chair, just as you used to sit in silence tending your flowers. No words, no criticism, no energy for long arguments.
I asked the image of you whether you had ever loved me. I cast you as guilty, myself as righteous. Your head was bowed while I hurled my anger and sorrow at your face. Why had you never praised me, even when I was promoted in the job you had insisted, I pursue? I showed you every wound. The day you left home. My mother clutching the phone, crying as she whispered about your selfishness. Her words sank into me, the same way they had sunk into her years before. And the night someone burned all my childhood photos. I always thought it was you. But no. It was her.
I stared at the cup of cold coffee in my shaking hand. My dry mouth. My reflection glaring back at me from the porcelain. That face was terrifyingly familiar. Yours. You had lived inside me all along. Fear seized the cup and shattered it against the floor. For a moment, time perched on the broken shards. The sound cracked something in me. Shame replaced anger. I felt a sudden tenderness for the old, silent man in my memories. He wasn’t the one who had hurt me. The face that had wounded me was right there in the fragments: the knotted brows, the thin white strands at the temples, that smug, dismissive curl of the lips. It was me. I was you, and you were the small boy who kept his eyes on the ground.
When I could breathe again, the second battle began. The one with myself. Had I ever loved you? Ever understood you? Had I ever been brave enough to ask to be touched, even once?
There was only one way to find an answer. I went through the old photo albums, damp with the smell of mold. Each page a tether to the past. My ninth birthday: my mother cooking your favorite dish, not mine. I still don’t know whether she feared you or wanted to force her way into your heart. My graduation photos from the field you had chosen for me. The New Year’s pictures smiling over a buried argument.
Anger. Then grief. Then contempt. Then something softer. Until I reached thirty-five years back. The winter day I slipped on the ice. My cheeks numb, my hands cracked and burning from the cold. You lifted me up, brushed me off. I searched your eyes for disapproval. Instead, you knelt so I could climb onto your back. I still feel the warmth of your shoulders on my frozen skin. You put a bandage on my scraped palms. You told me growing up always hurts.
I framed that photo of my bandaged hand and placed it where the missing piece of me used to be. The hollow in my chest began to fill, building a fragile bridge of memories and faint smiles. I turned the pages again and looked at the child in those pictures. Why had I never seen all those small smiles before?
Father, I wish you could have freed yourself from the stern man you had chained yourself to.
