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November 16, 1959. JUDAS, THE BELOVED EXECUTIONER. Sidney Tarachow, M.D.
This paper is an attempt to delineate the libidinal aspects of the Judas-Christ relationship, as well as of clinically related phenomena. Jesus is pictured as the willing victim offering Himself in love to be killed and eaten by the Jews and by Judas in particular. Judas is pictured as loving Jesus and as being burdened by the latter with the guilt of aggression by the invitation to be both lover and ritual executioner. Various clinical and anthropological data are used to illustrate the concept: killing in the service of love. Surrender in love is equated by the author to being killed and eaten. The intense oral aspects of love of the dead are emphasized—the dead being equated with the orally giving mother who never frustrates. Ritual sacrifice or ritual murder may have further libidinal motives, such as magical renewal of life or fecundation. Judas and Jesus are pictured as the pair of scapegoats necessary to solve by projection the ambivalent problems of the Christian, Jesus representing passive love, Judas, aggressive love. The relationship between the two is described as one of love, expressed in the theme of the killer and the slain. The equation of love and murder is also viewed from the standpoint of ego regression, to a state of antithesis and ambiguity. Various data are adduced suggesting that this relationship of murder may express the oral tie to the mother.