Abraham and the Contemporary Mind. Silvano Arieti. New York: Basic Books,1981, 184 pp

Silvano Arieti, the “grand old man” of schizophrenia studies and of the American Handbook of Psychiatry and Creativity, has turned his attention to another old man, the Biblical patriarch Abraham. Arieti does not aim at a psychobiographical analysis but rather seeks to call the reader's attention to Abraham's potential for inspiration for the contemporary world. Part of the current imbalance and anomie, Arieti argues, derives from the failure or refusal to accept man's basic dualism. Much of science — particularly biological psychiatry —tends to view man as only body; much of religion, and here Arieti singles out Pauline Christianity, tends to deny the body and to lay an overwhelming stress on man's spirit. Both views are dangerous and untenable. “Whereas God as conceived by Abraham may be all spiritual and incorporeal, man is not. He belongs to two worlds. He has a body from which the spiritual and psychological emerge.” By sanctifying the body and incorporating divine aspirations, Abraham discovered a way to live and love as a dualist, or, in Arieti's closing words,“to attune the earthly to the Imageless Transcendence.”

This wide ranging volume is built around four incidents in the life of Abraham: the legendary smashing of his father's idols, the dialogue between God and Abraham concerning the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the binding of Isaac, and the initiation of Hebrew ritual circumcision. There are, however, numerous asides into philosophical issues: the nature of the image of God in which man was created (which Arieti summarizes as the capacity to understand, to distinguish good and evil, to will, to love and to create); the accusation of deicide, that is, the so-called blood libel (whose roots Arieti sees in Jewish rejection of the divinity of Christ); the Decline of the Historical, the Segmentation of Man (where Arieti distinguishes three kinds of alienation: withdrawal, disconnection from one's feelings, and the more subtle loss of awareness of the i