Comments on Millar's ‘A psychoanalytic view of biblical myth’

Dear Sirs,

In his article ‘A psychoanalytic view of biblical myth’ (2001) David Millar presents some interesting and coherent ideas about particular group experiences and functioning and their connection with an idealised and punitive superego. In his concept of a ‘hardened myth’ I wonder if what he is actually describing is a particular group use of a myth. Bion suggests that myth, for the group, has the kind of role a model performs in scientific work: ‘an abstraction from an emotional experience or as a concretization of an abstraction’ (1984, p. 79). With reference to the themes of Millar's article, the emotional experience of living within the kind of ‘hardened’ state of a rigid defensive organisation, whether socially or individually constructed, is of a sense of certainty and security existing alongside feelings of instability and discontent. These feelings being both the product of and a reaction to the rigidity of the defensive organisation that also attacks the possibility of the emotional growth that might come from an attempt to integrate these disparate feelings. Instead myths become reinterpreted in an attempt to dispel difficult states of mind rather than as a way of exploring dilemmas. An example of this is how the myth of a messiah can be used to dispel a contemporary sense of discontent by holding out the hope of a future relief. I think it is possible to see the Jesus myth as an exploration of what this might actually mean and a kind of ironic reversal as it redefines the problem as freeing oneself from a particular state of mind, this state of mind including the wish for a messiah. To be more explicit, the death of Jesus could be seen as a ‘concretization of an abstraction’, the loss of the external ‘good object’. The resurrection myth understood as ‘an abstraction from an emotional experience’ represents the internalisation of a ‘good object’ in the recovery from the emotional experience of loss and disillusionment. In this understanding of the J