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Some clinicians find that religious imagery in their patients' productions may create a disquieting impingement on the evenness of their own attention and participation. Aside from C. G. Jung and his followers, psychoanalytic clinicians often seem more comfortable with patients whose imagery is largely secular. We lead off this Journal issue with the first of a two-part paper by James S. Grotstein in which this troubling spiritual dimension is explored.

Grotstein seeks to understand the feelings engendered in him (and, by extension, in ourselves) by a patient in analysis for several years. These feelings include contrition as the patient's father in the transference for having abused the patient, guilt as the patient's mother for passively standing by through the abuse, and humiliation as arising from empathy with the patient's own subjective experience of the abuse. In the process of considering these immediately practical questions that arose in the course of this analysis, Grotstein engages us in a grand question that, now that he has posed it for us, may seem in retrospect to haunt our psychoanalytic literature: Why Oedipus and not Christ? What are the contributions to clinical psychoanalysis of the myths of Oedipus, the star-crossed, incest-driven solver of puzzles—and of Christ, the transcendent martyr and savior?

Grotstein's question explores the epigenesis of suffering in the analytic process for both the patient and the analyst. This entails consideration of human sacrifice, which, Grotstein suggests, can be justly regarded as a crucial component of infant development (with crucial serving here as the most apt descriptor). This sacrifice, with its consequent suffering, blame, guilt, and redemption, is reproduced in the analysis through analytic regression. For Grotstein, this may be said to correspond for the patient to the myth of crucifixion. This has a corollary for the analyst. In the analyst, the particular countertransference pain experienced for reinst