Forms of the Sacred

This paper has developed out of my belief that it is possible to identify aspects of clinical psychoanalysis that derive from mythical scenarios other than that of Oedipus. Freud's (1912-1913) effort to illuminate the psychological influences of myth in ancient and modern cultures as a foundation of psychoanalytic metapsychology has been deemphasized in our need to become acceptable as a subspecialty of modern medicine. As a consequence we have privileged concepts of empirical validation and linear causality over myth and magic and historicity over mythical time. Notwithstanding a growing valuation of concepts such as soul, demons, chimera, ghosts as well as “undead” presences (Grotstein, 1997), a logical-positivistic understanding of mental life predominates in psychoanalytic metapsychology.

This paper began to coalesce around my work with a man suffering from a depression of many years. Two themes emerged early in the course of his treatment. The first involved an unconscious creation in which he would offer himself as a eucharistic sacrifice to be consumed by others. The second was a sense that both his work and his analysis represented a return to an embryonic situation that required an obstetric rebirth. The magical and mythical quality of his actions and words could not be explained by the predominant psychoanalytic oedipal myth. Rather, I was struck by their similarity to ancient initiatory practices. The idea of dying to one form of being in order to be created anew, paramount in initiation rites, seemed essential to his belief and functioning.

I was especially impressed by his revolt against concrete historical time and his hostility toward a history not regulated by his own vision of an “archetypal” origin. This rejection of an autonomous history is particularly relevant to archaic societies and their periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things, to the “Great Time” (Eliade, 1957). Accordingly, my focus in his analysis shifted to conside