I'm curious to know if anyone has any ideas on and/or has found any good writing on the connections and similarities between Freud's theory of the origin of the "totem and taboo" system of society, and the story of "genesis" as told within the christian religions.... any ideas and/or resources would be greatly appreciated.... thanks!

-- dawn mordarski (auroram137@aol.com), February 27, 2002

Answers

You might check the previous thread on Freud and religion at http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=007v3U

I am not aware of any particular analysis that answers your question, but in Wulff's book cited in the previous thread, you'll find an excellent overview of Freud on religion. You can find references for related works in Hendrika Vande Kemp, Psychology and Theology in Western Thought 1672-1965: A Historical and Annotated Bibliography (Kraus Thomson, 1984). Totem and Taboo speaks little to the historical issues of Genesis, whereas you'll find some interesting psychoanalytic interpretations of the events in Genesis in books like Theodor Reik's The Creation of Woman: A Psycholanalytic Inquiry Into the Myth of Eve (George Braziller, 1960), The Temptation (George Braziller, 1961) or Erich Wellisch's Isaac and Oedipus: A Study in Biblical Psychology of the Sacrifice of Isaac, the Ikedah (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). An entirely different approach to the Ikedah is found in Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), February 27, 2002.