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like God.”178 Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex is obviously
interpretable as a powerful psychological representation of the universal desire to be like God: to sin by rebellion, by disobedience, by striving to become the autonomous ruler over one’s own and others’ lives.
Now, in a Christian framework, Jesus provides the model for the negation—in fact, for the canceling out or removal—of the Oedipal structure. In contrast to Oedipal man, Jesus shows not intense hatred but perfect love for God the Father. This love is expressed in what has been called “radical obedience”—that is, total identification with the Father’s will (whereas Oedipal man shows radical disobedience). Throughout the Gospels, Jesus consistently speaks of doing his Father’s will and not his own: “I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me”179; “not my will, but thine, be done.”180 The result of this radical obedience is the death of the Son. He is not killed by the Father, but by a group of conflict-filled, frightened, and hateful men. That is, the group of brothers kills not the Father but the Son. It is then the Son’s death that occurs, and not the Father’s, as was the case for Oedipal man. The results of this death are not the guilt and remorse that follow the Oedipal murder, but atonement, resurrection, and joy. There is a “rebirth,” in which the Father and Son are now together and not estranged. The followers of Jesus—the new group of brothers (brothers in Christ)—are called to become sons of God by modeling their lives on that of Jesus. One important way in which this is done is through Holy Communion, in which the followers are commanded to eat the body and drink the blood of the Son in the bread and wine; this “totemic” meal is the opposite of Freud’s postulated ancient father-focused Oedipal meal. To round out the Anti-Oedipal pattern, Jesus shows no sign of sexual desire for his mother; in fact, by choosing celibate life, he explicitly puts sexuality completely aside as a determining motivation. In short, the life of Jesus is the life of Anti-Oedipus (see Table 5-1). Now the extraordinary fact is that Freud was, in many important respects, aware of this logic, which is at the very center of the Christian view of man. He commented in an important, apparently almost completely overlooked, passage near the end of Totem and Taboo: There can be no doubt that in the Christian myth the original sin was one against God the Father. If, however, Christ redeemed mankind from the burden of original sin by the sacrifice of his own life, we are driven to conclude that the sin was a murder. The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by bloodguilt. And if this sacrifice of a life brought about atonement with God the Father, the crime to be expiated can only have been the murder of the father. In the Christian doctrine, therefore, men were acknowledging in the most undisguised manner the guilty primaeval deed, since they found the fullest atonement for it in the sacrifice of this one son. Atonement with the father was all the more complete |