Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/103

 BOOK REVIEWS ge

of miracles, since they knew of no natural order which would be in conflict with them, (2) that miracles were expected from the Messiah Dr. Berguer divides the recorded miracles into three categories' (a) cures, which can for the most part be satisfactorily explained in the hght of modern psycho-therapy (the healing of the Gadarene beine taken as an example and coasidered in detail), (b) events, such as the feedmg of the five thousand, in which-according to the view here propounded-a moral significance was mistaken for a material significance (whence the miraculous element), (c) a third class, such as the tumine water mto wme, which cannot be explained on either of the above prmciples and as regards which it is probable that we have to do with simple legendary growdis based on inaccurate reports and memories of real events.

After a brief chapter devoted to the Transfiguration, Dr. Berguer deals m the seventh chapter-perhaps the most difficult in the book- with 'The Personality of Jesus.' He first considers the difficulties with which Christ was confronted owing to the fact that the adoption of the r61e of the long expected Messiah represented the only way of fulfilling his mission, while on the other hand this role was much too narrow and nabonal for his purposes. Then follows (and this is the difficult part) a more detailed treatment of Christ's conception of the 'Father- In the course of this we leam, among other things: (i) that Christ's Father corresponds to what psycho-analysts have called Libido (obviously in Jung's enlarged sense), to Schopenhauer's Will, to Gaston Fromrael's obligahOH morale and Bergson's ^lan vital; {2) that in Christ there were absent those elements of intra-psychica! conflict which lead to dissociation and neurosis, the whole personality proceeding in an orderly and harmonious manner towards the self-appointed end ('I and my Father are one"), there being thus no necessity in the case of Christ for anything in the nature of a religious conversion; this continuity between the Father' and himself was in the last resort an experience which was mystical in nature (p. 163); (3) that his hatred of the 'Father' corresponding to the ordinary hate aspects of the Oedipus complex- was directed on to certain false ideas of the 'Father' it being these false -ideas that he requires his followers to abandon, when he says If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and .his own life also he cannot be my disciple.' Interesting as this chapter is, the psycho-analytic reader will probably feel that the importance of the material as distinguished from the functional aspects, of Christ's symbolism is-here also-not infrequently underrated, and, in particular, that the ideas leading Christ to identify himself with the 'Father' have a more literal as well as an anagogic significance. To the present reviewer, at any rate, It seems a matter for regret that some of the relevant suggestions