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Robert Langs has discovered mortality and the fear of death, which the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig set out as the source of philosophy (1970). Indeed, now Langs puts death anxiety at the center of human life, and in this book he sets out to demonstrate that he—by uncovering the depths of the “deep unconscious”—is able to exceed God in helping humans respond to that anxiety. Langs asserts that we all suffer from traumatic anxiety related to the fact that we cannot escape death (existential death anxiety), that there are predators set on killing us (predatory anxiety), and that we are all guilty of harming others and therefore deserving of the only punishment, death (predatory guilt). Langs' thesis is that the God of the Old Testament and Jesus, Christianity's attempt to revise that God, are also troubled by anxiety about death and have failed to help humanity deal effectively with these anxieties; Langs then asserts that he alone has faced these anxieties and found the wisdom to create a new basis for morality that could reform the world.
I have long respected Robert Langs for his forthright insistence on strict adherence to the analytic frame in our work with our patients, for his insistence that any deviation from that frame must reflect countertransference impulses, and for his perception that patients may perceive such deviations as threats as well as attempts to be helpful. However, I have also felt that Langs is often narrowly focused and too insistent on his own perception of what he calls the “deep unconscious,” and I have seen him in public excoriate therapists he saw as violating the frame even inadvertently. Now in this book Langs confronts the reality of mortality, and typically for him, he interprets all previous efforts at that task as inadequate and futile. For Langs what he describes as the “wisdom of the deep unconscious” exceeds the wisdom of religion, at least the religion of Yahweh and Jesus recorded in the texts of Judaism and Christianity