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In dealing with the resistance in a chronically depressed, childhood-abused Jewish patient the analyst experienced evocative religious imagery that seemed to anticipate the patient's dramatic religious experience of becoming awed in the presence of a statue of Christ in a cathedral in Paris. This contribution is in two parts. Part I deals with the interrelationship of the myths of Christ and Oedipus. The themes that unite them include the religious experience, human sacrifice, innocence, original sin, the covenant, and the Faustian bargain. An attempt is made to integrate the Christ and Oedipus thematics from the religious/spiritual vertex.
In the course of analyzing a physician in his 30s who suffered from a lifelong depression presumably due, among other factors, to severe child abuse, I found myself resonating with some of the patient's more graphic memories in a way I came to understand as a response to his unconscious communication to me of painful abusive experiences from his childhood. This chronically depressed, early middle-aged Canadian Jewish physician had been in analysis with me for seven years at the time of this incident and had been in a state of prolonged and weary resistance for some time. During a vacation to Paris he visited the Cathedral de le Sacre Coeur, where he reported that he had a “religious experience.” He gazed upon the statue of Christ who, with His'1 bleeding wounds, seemed to have reached out mercifully and forgivingly to the patient. The patient then exclaimed to me, “I don't need psychoanalysis! I need God in order to regain my innocence!”
The patient had no way of knowing that during this session and even presciently during previous sessions with him I had been countersubjectively visualizing the image of Michelangelo's Pietà and, equally mysteriously to me, silently reciting to myself, “washed in the blood of the