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The writer has for some time been engaged in a psychoanalytic study of biblical personalities, a number of which have appeared in American Imago.
One of the interesting concepts that emerged from these studies was a point of view about the nature and function of the Bible as a whole. She sees the Bible (Old Testament) as an expression of the Hebraic approach to what is regarded as the nuclear psychological conflict of each human being—the Oedipal struggle.
This body of literature might be considered as performing the same function for the Hebrews as the Oedipus Rex drama did for the ancient Greeks. However, instead of their heroes acting out the primordial crime as Oedipus did, the Hebrews, through centuries of struggle, slowly evolved a form of sublimation, a religion and morality which found expression in their principles of ethical monotheism and in their social and cultural standards for group living.
The text of the Bible contains the story of this evolution. The Bible is a remarkable expression of the development of the superego, the heir to the Oedipal conflict, portrayed as a group drama, with its leaders as the representative actors. It is the dynamic expression of a whole people involved in a spiritual struggle and a phase of development in a world where their efforts represented a fairly new type of solution—the solution of ethical monotheism as related to the everyday life of the group.
The particular forms which this conflict took, its massive repression of incestuous wishes toward the mother and the consequent increase of ambivalence between father and