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After first expounding the semiotic function of myth, the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is reformulated as a representation of the inauguration of internalization and of the entry of the infant into the dimension of symbolic language. Special attention is given to the “Yes!”/“No!” dichotomy and the establishment of primary and secondary repression. The forbidden fruit is viewed as the enigmatic “minus factor”that symbolic language must enframe and psychotic language denies. Lacan's ironic postulation of an “original sin” at the core of psychoanalysis itself is reinterpreted
Dr. Spero is Professor, Postgraduate Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University; Senior Clinical Psychologist and Research Scholar in Psychoanalysis and Religion, Department of Psychiatry, Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital; Clinical Instructor, Eliezer Ilan Child and Adolescent Treatment Center, Jerusalem, Israel.
in terms of the psychoanalyst's capacity to bracket rather than eliminate his natural desire for the analysand, thereby maintaining the necessary minus factor in analytic dialogue.