Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Bertram Lewin agreed with the formulation of the beloved executioner, noting its modern counterpart in detective fiction, for instance, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Dr. Bernard Brodsky felt that in the American culture there is an identification and secret admiration of the Judas figure. Jehovah was a God at the service of the superego, 'distant, aloof, and threatening, whose promises of favor were for the future. Pagan gods are id oriented. They are gods who know incest and whose characters are dreamlike. Jehovah demanded renunciation of instinctual drives.' Dr. Brodsky felt that Jesus became part of the group superego by being betrayed by the man He loved. Dr. Warner Muensterberger reviewed the psychoanalytic approaches to religion. He felt that Dr. Tarachow had made a valuable contribution to the literature in terms of the oral aspects of life and death. To Dr. Muensterberger the story of Christ is one of the denial of the real father, the denial of impotence, and the denial of death. Christ executes a split of the ego by giving Himself to His disciples at the Last Supper, while His other body is delivered to the father as the person of authority. The aggression against the father is through the mother in the case of Jesus. The death of Jesus led to a magical anointing of His believers, and it is the anointing with the unity of the blood and the wine that unifies them into a band of brothers.

In reply Dr. Tarachow reiterated that the central theme of his paper was that the Christ story reveals the oral tie to the mother. He was interested in Dr. Brodsky's concept that Christ was raised to superego status by the betrayal by