You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The scope of this book, the author's questions, and his good will make it enjoyable to read but difficult to review. Clearly the result of many years of reading in diverse fields and of years of discussion with esteemed colleagues, it contends with a vast topic—the development of two world religions—using as its leitmotif the theme of sacrificial infanticide. It is really two books. In Part One, “Sacrificial Infanticide and the Development of Western Religions,” roughly the first 200 pages, Bergmann uses historical and psychoanalytic reconstructions to account for one version of anti-Semitism. In Part Two, “Dialogue with Freud,” about 100 pages, he debates Freud's oedipal theory of religion and supplements it with a restatement of the Laius complex as a mythic expression of parental rage and aggression. Historians of religion and nonexpert audiences may favor the first part, while clinicians may favor the second.
Bergmann, who is a Clinical Professor of Psychology at New York University, a practicing psychoanalyst, and author of previous books on psychoanalysis and culture, sets out his major thesis: that the “Jewish religion as we know it today had its beginning is the prohibition against the sacrifice of children” (p. 3). Whereas some ancient Near Eastern religions, like that associated with Moloch, required the sacrifice of children as burnt offerings to the deities, Judaism and later Christianity transformed these actions through