Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/71

 A PSYCHO- ANALYTIC STUDY OF THE CHRISTIAN CREED 63

which Jesus and his disciples undergo, but in Hell it shall be of no avail. The sinner shall be judged by the help of Jesus and his apostles and shall be condemned to a final exclusion from heaven. No doubt Jesus was quite unconscious of the hate which crept into his teaching and counterbalanced his strong insistence on non-resisting love.

"The Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come"

Jesus' conscious will to die was probably strengthened by an unconscious impulse to suicide. Yet even this abnormal form of self-sacrifice is not a wish for final extinction, and is therefore only in apparent opposition to the desire embodied in the above clauses in the Creed. Death is a way of escape from insuperable external obstacles and internal conflicts. Under the rationalisation and moralisation about the need for a ransom and a sacrifice lies the unconscious desire to return to oblivion in the mother in order to be re-born from the maternal womb. A mere regression to child- hood or adolescence would not produce the desired state of un- impeded passivity and the immediate satisfaction of all impulses, associated only with the intra-uterine condition.

It was only the conscious reason of Nicodemus that supposed his re-birth an impossibility. The mystical author of the fourth Gospel shared St. Paul's belief that he could die with Christ in order to be born again. The resurrection becomes a mystical regeneration for all who will to reverse their affective and intellec- tual life in the direction of childhood. The regression implied in the Christian Creed stops short of the desire for the lap of luxury in Nirvana. The Christian feels the same desire to be swallowed in the maternal waters of death, but expects in addition a new and more satisfying bodily life.

Dr. Ernest Jones remarks that the thoughts of birth and death lie inseparably close together in the unconscious. Hence the idea of immortality is an ever recurring palliative offered by religion to sorrowing humanity under the domination of its infantile com- plexes. "Neither the child's mind nor the adult unconscious can apprehend the idea of personal annihilation" (Papers on Psycho- Analysis, p. 661). The conscious horror of incest has driven the mother goddess from the Christian Creed, but she is implied in the belief in immortality. Since the infantile unconscious by no