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Children frequently identify themselves with exalted religious figures. (10,11) These identifications help to bridge earlier self-images, such as forbidden or rejected identifications with parents, and adult identity. They contribute not only to the formation of adaptive roles in human society but also to abnormal states.
Bible stories, holy pictures and church ritual are significant in the development of these religious identifications. For instance, a boy, reared in the Roman Catholic Church, identified himself with Jesus Christ. (11) This identification contributed on the one hand to a pathological sexual identity and on the other to a successful business career and a satisfying social life. The series of pictures with accompanying ritual called “The Way of the Cross,” in which the humiliation and torture of Christ on his way to Calvary and his crucifixion there are relived, was an all-important determinant. As the result of previous childhood events, the sight of Christ's suffering led to a fateful identification with the sufferer and a libidinization of the suffering. Thus the development of masochistic homosexuality was anticipated and furthered. Christ's role as one who miraculously fed the multitude (Luke 9) and supplied wine at the marriage feast (John 2) was utilized in the patient's work identity as a wholesale distributor of food and liquor. Christ's role as
the Host in the ritual of Holy Communion and at the Last Supper was utilized in his social identity as The Party Host.
Freud's Wolf-Man, too, identified himself with Christ. His case history is described in “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” which is, to quote the editor of the Standard Edition, “no doubt, the most important of Freud's case histories.” (5)
A comparison of the Wolf-Man and the other patient reveals a number of similarities. Both identified themselves with long-suffering mothers. Both had fathers who used “affectionate abuse,” to employ Freud's term, and were regarded by their