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Freud's ‘Oedipus complex’ indicates the importance of myths in the development of psychoanalytic theories; indeed Bion reserves a whole line of his grid for dream thoughts, dreams and myths (row C). The Biblical Genesis is so rich in myths of our culture that it is surprising more has not been made of it (as far as I am aware) by psychoanalysts and those using psychoanalytic insights which have diffused into other fields. Freud might have made use of any of these myths - Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, David and Goliath - as a starting point for exploring the inner world. He chose the Greek myths possibly because his upbringing allowed him to view these more objectively.
Eric Rhode's book is firmly founded in Genesis, which he uses for an internal dialogue with what Bion would call the ‘ineffable’. He writes: ‘We all find a common Adamic inheritance … My Adam lives in the realms of intuition and magic’. Rhode says his book is a type of ‘anti-biography’ - a term which he uses to describe his observation of an interaction between his own deeply primitive inner self and the Genesis myth of creation, a sort of pre-symbolic consciousness. Genesis conveys the bright sun and dark shade of what he calls ‘psychotic literalism’ or, in Bionic terms, pre-natal realism. As Rhode points out, literary tradition is steeped in the Genesis myths as in Milton's Paradise Lost; but he says here these are worked on from a ‘neurotic’ rather than a ‘psychotic’ primitive angle. Whereas Dante, Cezanne, T S