The real foundation of a man's inquiry does not strike a person at all. -- And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

As the first man and woman leave the Garden, I am with them. Because the ancient voice of the text speaks to me, I feel their longing to go back, their guilt and shame about what they have just done, their fears about the future. I feel their anxiety about whether their Creator, their Father, their God is still with them, and still loves them. I feel their panic quickly rise as they recognize that this no-longer-so-cozy world might not make life possible for them or their children.

As Abraham walks silently up the mountain to sacrifice his son, I am with him. I ask the same questions he asks. Should I obey the dictates of my God and my principles, or is there a higher good that involves the sanctity of human life? Can I be Abraham if I refuse to listen to the God I revere and lead others to know and worship? Can I be Abraham if my beloved God that I worship demands human blood for His adoration?

As Jacob wrestles throughout the long dark night, I am with him. I know how he struggles with himself and his history. I sweat with him as he glares at his own betrayal of his father and brother. I sweat with him as he witnesses, full-face, his character, naked and base. Then, the next morning, I weep as he and his brother weep--brothers at last.

My goal in this book is to bring you right next to me on this pilgrimage into the psychological wisdom literature that is Genesis. For this journey, it is Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his children, and even God who serve as guides. It is my fervent hope that, by examining the narratives and heroes of Genesis, we will, by journey's end, find ourselves.

This book is the love child of my mind and heart. It is an offspring of my self as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst living in twenty-first century America, and my self as a Jew living within an ancient history and tradition. This book's conception was not the product of impulse, but rather reflects a lengthy process, an idea that evolved, more often than not, without my conscious awareness. Like the joyous couple who has just given birth, it is my hope that this literary love child will be blessed with the best of each of its parents--have the best of the present and the past, the best of the secular and the religious, and the best of contemporary psychology and ancient wisdom.

Why this book?

Ten years ago, when I prepared the first of countless public lectures and classes to come on the relationship between psychology and the Bible, I was completely unaware of the journey on which I was about to embark. That day, seated in my psychotherapy office, as I organized my notes on the psychology of the binding of Isaac, I had only the slightest inkling of the power that this subject and other biblical subjects and their myriad derivatives would have over me personally, and on my work and thinking as a psychoanalyst. Until that day, I was a serious student of psychology and psychoanalysis, and only a casual student of religion. What I studied in the Bible class I attended at my synagogue on some Saturday mornings, I generally understood as a psychologist--interpreting the biblical text the way I might interpret a patient's dream, seeing the Torah verse within the constricted purview of my contemporary psychoanalytic theory, making little effort to appreciate the scholars and faithful who had energetically struggled with the same verses since they were first chanted more than two thousand years ago.

After that first psychology-Bible lecture, I was hooked. Something in the intersection of the psychological and the biblical fascinated and disturbed me. I found myself reading everything I could about the history of the biblical text. I found myself scrutinizing and contemplating the convergent and divergent ways in which various commentators interpreted a line of Torah. I found myself studying and considering Jewish, Christian and Muslim sages who struggled to make sense of a biblical narrative within their religious tradition and their sociocultural and historical context. I found myself marveling at the way my scholar ancestors, from all three monotheistic traditions, responded with conceptual creativity and acute senses to seemingly-minor inconsistencies and distant subterranean rumblings in the sacred text. I found myself preoccupied with understanding the biblical mind, and the thousands of minds that examined the Canon for guidance and inspiration. I found myself troubled, and sometimes sleepless, thinking about the "negative tradition" within the bible--Lot offering his daughters to an enraged mob in Sodom, Moses ordering the genocide of the Midianites, God killing the Israelite rebels and their families. I found myself captivated by my spiritual predecessors' striving to find meaning and beauty in the ancient.

My religious studies led me to see an arrogance in psychoanalysis that I had not so clearly seen before. Sigmund Freud, a proud heir to the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century, understood religion as representing all things backward-looking, dogmatic and close-minded. Science, for Freud, on the contrary, was open-minded and modern. Freud and the majority of Freudians made a great effort to distinguish psychoanalysis, their infant "science," from religious practice and belief. With religious study, I became troubled by the assumption and the belief that psychoanalysis, only a youthful player on the field of human transformation, a mere one hundred years old, holds itself out as unique. It strikes me as ironic that a discipline, whose basic discoveries involves placing the individual within his context, asserting that each individual is profoundly influenced by his history, and can only be understood within his history, claims to be a brand new discovery, a discipline without context. For Freud and the vast majority of his followers, psychoanalysis was most definitely not to be associated with religion.

That first psychology-Bible lecture led me on the road which I am now traveling--to understand psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as a discipline within the long-standing and well-established wisdom tradition of Western religion.

My religious studies also had impact on the clinical situation. I began to hear the biblical in my patients' narratives. I heard the echo of Judah, one of Jacob's sons, in my patient Seth. For years, he carried the oppressive weight of an extramarital affair that not only puzzled, but sickened him. Like Judah, who was instrumental in selling his young brother into slavery in Egypt, Seth suffered. Both Judah and Seth had to face themselves and those they had betrayed and hurt in order to find peace in their lives.

In my patient Janet, I heard the echo of idolatry, both appreciated as intensely seductive and vehemently condemned in the pages of the Bible. Janet, feeling empty and devoid of value, fell in love with a long list of powerful men who she idealized, submitted to and resented. Marriages, again and again, disintegrated. Janet each time would end up hating the idol/husband who could not maintain his godly position and make Janet feel safe. Repeatedly, Janet found herself abandoned by her deity. This sad woman was left alone to face herself and her emptiness--impelling her to seek yet another idol to worship.

In my patient Neil, I heard the echo of the wrathful and capricious God. encountered in the Book of Numbers. So terrified of the unanticipated attack--the taxi who might swerve into his lane, the bus driver who might lose consciousness, the elevator cable that might give way--that he lived a life in which he controlled the angry gods by interring himself within his apartment. Neil's world, like that of the Israelites in the wilderness, was rife with terror, unpredictability and superstition.

In my patient Joan, I heard the echo of Mount Moriah, where Abraham prepared a fiery sacrificial altar for his son. A woman with three young children, Joan felt driven to find "love's blissful union" with a man. Each time Joan found herself in a relationship, she rationalized her abandonment of her children by asserting that this was ultimately in their best interest, and even serving a higher spiritual purpose for them and for her.

In each of my patients who were becoming more whole, I heard the echo of the marching feet of the children of Israel who so long and unhappily wandered through the desert of Sinai. In the psychoanalysis, with each step away from their idiosyncratic constrictions and their personal pharaohs and Egypts, my patients' unfamiliar turf of the future became more terrifying. As well, their nostalgia for the old and familiar became more palpable. Like the Israelites in the Torah, the journey from Egypt to our Promised Land is dangerous, protracted and circuitous.

Beyond the compelling ancient narratives that reverberate with contemporary human voices, over the past ten years of my expanding scholarly interests and vision, I discovered that the religious can offer much of what I found lacking in the psychological. The glory of psychoanalysis is that it provides a space in which the nuance can be explored and examined. Each dream image, fantasy, memory, association, and relationship past and present is subject of the psychoanalytic inquiry within the analyst-patient couple. In this clinical process, individuality is understood and revered. The individual is not only the subject of the psychoanalytic inquiry, but also its goal. The aim of psychoanalysis is an integrated and self-aware individual.

The religious viewpoint offers us something different. The individual in the sacred text is certainly important--Abraham, Rebecca, Joseph, Moses, Cyrus, Mary, Pilate, Peter, Muhammad--but he or she is not the goal of the inquiry. In the religious, the individual always dwells within the intricately-woven nest of community and the Divine. In the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and Koran, each individual is an instrument of God's plan or purpose, or an obstacle to it. Each individual is profoundly affected by the spiritual successes or failings of the previous generations. Similarly, the choices made by each individual in one generation makes a deep mark on the lives his children and grandchildren will live. In the sacred texts, and not from the psychoanalytic, I discovered that each individual has a greater purpose beyond himself, that each individual's life must be viewed within an expansive and sweeping multigenerational landscape involving heaven and earth.

Even Sigmund Freud conceded that religion and its ritual practices served a socially useful function. In one of the earliest papers in which he characterized religion as psychopathology, as reflecting a public obsessive compulsion, Freud understood that religion was a positive force in aiding the individual in his struggle with socially-destructive ambitions. Freud wrote, "The formation of a religion too seems to be based on the suppression and renunciation of certain instinctual impulses. These impulses however are not, as in the neuroses, exclusively components of the sexual instinct. They are self-seeking, socially-harmful instincts [that religious ritual defends against]."

Understandings as to how people change are a preoccupation of both the religious and the psychological points of view. I began to see how religious theories of transformation can deepen psychological perspectives. The focus of psychoanalysis is insight. Its assumption is that if the patient were able to make the unconscious conscious, to become aware of what has been hidden, yet dominating, that transformation of behavior and character would flow naturally from this new awareness. In this psychoanalytic model of change, insight is king, and action an after-thought.

My inquiry into the Bible and its implicit theories of how people change, encased within the ancient narratives, revealed that the sacred text, like the psychoanalyst, does appreciate the importance of insight. However, for the biblical, insight is not the endpoint of human transformation, but rather a significant stop on the way to it. Judah does not only have to recognize that he has wronged his daughter-in-law Tamar, but also has to confess his sin publicly and make amends to her. Jacob does not only have to wrestle with himself all through the night, but, as the sun rises, has to face the brother he betrayed twenty years before. Joseph's brothers do not only have to know and experience their guilt for their murderous impulses and scheme, but have to demonstrate to Joseph and themselves that they have changed. They will be severely tested. Will they again betray Jacob's favorite son (this time Benjamin)? Even God, after blotting out almost all life on the planet He had lovingly created only six chapters before, not only regrets the Flood, but also makes reparation. God resolves never again to destroy the world, and sends a rainbow to remind Him of this promise. For the biblical heroes of transformation, insight is necessary so that action can be taken.

So far, I have focused on how the ancient can augment and extend the modern. Are there no ways in which the contemporary psychoanalytic perspective can deepen the religious?

My inquiry into the sacred text and the myriad Jewish, Christian and Muslim voices commenting on it, discovered that the Bible is read, in each case, through a clouded lens. The actual text in the Torah, in most cases, is obscured by the reader's specific theological "ax to grind." Some examples: The eating of the fruit in Eden is the act that causes mankind to fall, not referred to in the text, thereby requiring a Christ to redeem us from sin. Isaac is 37-years-old, not a lad as he is referred to in the text, when his father Abraham brings him to the slaughtering site, thereby giving Isaac a more active role in choosing this horrifying test. Esau, Isaac's older son and Jacob's brother, is more an evil figure than he is a pathetic victim of his mother's agenda and his brother's ambitions, as portrayed in the text, thereby making Jacob's deception and betrayal somewhat less morally reprehensible. For many segments of the religious community, in each of the three Abrahamic religions, the biblical text is read through the eyes of specific respected commentators with distinctive "spins" on what is written. A possible result of this process is that the biblical text may be crushed under the pressure of interpretation.

On the contrary, the power of the psychoanalytic stance is its commitment to pursue an undefended and unfiltered perception of the individual. This is precisely what motivates the analyst to suggest free association to the patient. This is the reason for psychoanalytic focus on the resistances, within the patient and the analyst--to clear away obstacles to truthful perception and apperception. It is this observation without "spin" that Freud argues is the ideal that the analyst and patient should energetically seek in the analytic situation. Freud writes, "The technique [of psychoanalysis] is a very simple one: ... It consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular, and in maintaining the same 'evenly suspended attention,' as I have called it, in the face of all that one hears. ... For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him. One point will be fixed in his mind with particular clarity, and some other will be correspondingly disregarded; and in making this selection, he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This is precisely what must not be done. ... If he follows his expectations, he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows. And if he follows his inclinations, he will certainly falsify what he may perceive."

What Freud advocated for both the patient and the analyst in the psychoanalytic situation, this "evenly suspended attention" in relation to the clinical material, this perception of the subject without prejudice, theory or agenda, I also discovered, in this past ten years of serious biblical study, to be a useful ideal when investigating the personalities and narratives included in the Torah. Yes, I learned to appreciate the sensitivity, perceptiveness and creativity of the commentaries on the biblical narrative, but also to distinguish text from comment. It was the application of the psychoanalytic stance to the biblical that made this possible.

Thus far, I have emphasized the ways in which the biblical and psychoanalytic are different. In the past decade, however, I have also discovered the remarkable convergence of these two worlds I have most of the time quite comfortably straddled. The psychoanalytic attitude toward the clinical material and the commentator's attitude toward the sacred text have much in common. I would summarize both sets of attitudes, while standing on one foot, by stating that there is no such thing as nonsense. Ben Bag Bag, a Babylonian rabbi, quoted in the Mishnah, taught, speaking about the sacred text, "Turn it, turn it, for all is within it, and contemplate it, and grow gray and old over it, and stir not from it." In the same vein, Freud, almost two thousand years later, describing what he had learned from his neurology professor, Jean Martin Charcot, and summarizing both Freud's and Charcot's scientific method, wrote that the psychoanalytic inquiry involved looking "at the same things, again and again, until they themselves begin to speak." This single stance in relation to the sacred text/clinical material is the hallmark of the method that the contemporary psychoanalyst and the ancient biblical commentator share. It is interesting to note that Freud made this explicit early in his career as a psychoanalyst when he referred to the patient's dream as a "sacred text."

What I discovered, when sitting with and listening to my patients or studying an ancient text, that the task is the same. This task always involves directing my attention so completely to the words that I can fill in the spaces between, behind, around and below the words. Sometimes, this process involves listening to the silences that are deafening, for example, Abraham rising early in the morning to sacrifice his son after receiving the command from God the night before, with no words of protest from Abraham or description of his sleepless night. Then sometimes, this process involves uncovering the disguise that lurks behind the words, for example, discerning what is meant by a specific image or association, a ladder, a dark corner, a river, a serpent, a necklace. Other times, this process involves raising questions about the consistency of the narrative or the character of the protagonists, for example, if Isaac is a wealthy man and sends his son, Jacob, away with a blessing, why is Jacob on this terrifying wilderness journey with neither possession or servant.

For me, sometimes the psychoanalyst, sometimes the biblical commentator, the method also has a shared purpose--by exploring each nuance of the material under scrutiny, no matter how seemingly trivial or irrelevant, I attempt to relate to the material, actively struggle with it, in order to discover multiple meanings within it. Whether analyzing a patient's dream or reconciling two discrepant biblical texts, I have found that it is this psychoanalytic-biblical inquiry, this energetic engagement with whatever story is being heard, that gives life to, and honors its subject and object.

Most central to the project of this book, over the ten years of my becoming a serious student of religion, I have been struck by how the vital questions that the psychoanalyst, Bible, rabbi, priest, minister and imam ask are, for the most part, the same questions. Who are we? What is our nature and potential? How much of our nature is divine breath, that is, transcendent, inspirational, creative; and how much of our nature is governed by our animal histories and biological, cultural and social limitations? Do we have freedom of choice and action? What is the nature of and the restriction on this freedom? When we suffer, what helps? Is human transformation possible? If so, how do we change? What is required to make a new choice in one's life? Are there constraints on this potential for transformation? What is it that helps us find meaning in our experience and our lives?
It is these questions that are the focus of this book.

It was on September 11, 2001, as I sat in my New York city psychotherapy office, three miles north of the World Trade Center that was abruptly and eerily no more, that I decided that I had to write this book. With the smoke and dust choking my beloved city, and a gaping bleeding hole in its soul, the obscene result of religious fundamentalism, I felt the need to write what I had learned, taught and lectured for the past ten years--that in the biblical narrative lies answers to the most important and troubling contemporary questions of our lives; that we do not have to yield this great library of psychological wisdom literature to the fundamentalists.
It was on that day of death and devastation that I decided to capture in print my journey to the sacred. It is my burning hope and prayer that this book helps us reaffirm that our lives do have meaning, beauty and purpose. This is, after all, the point of the Bible, and its most compelling, lasting and cherished message. This is the genius of Genesis.

For additional information about this book and instructions for ordering, go to:
http://www.DennisShulman.com