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Saul, the first king of ancient Israel, is often described as a tragic figure. In the classical meaning of the word, the essence of tragedy is a blind and futile struggle against one's destiny. Psychoanalytically, it can be seen as the battle with unconscious conflicts, and in this sense the word befittingly describes the subject of this study.
The personality of Saul is of special interest to the psychoanalyst, for this king of antiquity is clearly portrayed as suffering from an emotional malady, or, in the graphic terminology of the Bible, being possessed by an “evil spirit.” The purpose of this study is to present a developmental picture of Saul's history and his patterns of behavior to see if there is a psychological consistency in the biblical material concerning him, and to discern, if possible, the specific nature of his conflicts.
This first monarch of ancient Israel appears upon the scene of Hebrew history in the unassuming role of a farmer's son, who together with a servant is engaged in looking for his father's strayed donkeys. The impression one gets from this situation is that Saul is still quite a young man and, as such, logically subject to parental guidance and control. The Bible, in fact, calls him “young and goodly.” Yet Saul at this time was already the father of a number of children, according to the more convincing of the two possible interpretations of available chronological data. (1) His son Jonathan was evidently old enough to serve as a soldier of unusual courage and strategy only two years later. (2) Saul therefore must have been a man who had reached the