The Eden Complex: Transgression and Transformation in the Bible, Freud and Jung ^†

Abstract

Freud chose the myth of Oedipus as the foundation for his understanding of human development, obedience to the law, and his theory of civilization, and he wrote that he saw no psychological value in analyzing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on biblical interpretation, the Kabbalah, and the work of C. G. Jung, it is argued that Adam and Eve’s transgression serves as an archetype for an “Eden Complex” that provides a broad and useful paradigm for understanding the dynamics of individual development, parent–child conflict, morals and values, and both psychotherapeutic and societal change.

1. Introduction

Freud famously declared that the “superego is … the heir to the Oedipus Complex” (Freud 1959, p. 78). By this phrase, he suggested that the imagined transgression through which the son displaces his father—the rival for his mother’s love—results in an experience of castration anxiety and guilt, the internalization of the incest prohibition, and, more broadly, an obedience to the “law of the father” upon which is founded the entire edifice of civilization. According to Freud, “we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers and our first hatred and violent wishes toward our fathers … King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realized wish of our childhood” (Freud 1913, p. 223). Freud concludes that this fantasized (incestuous) transgression is repressed, and the child becomes subject to an internalized prohibition and law. Thus, in the Freudian model, if the family, and indeed civilization, is to be sustained, the transgression must not occur, and even the fantasy of its occurrence must be removed from the child’s conscious awareness.

Freud’s “choice” of the Oedipus myth as the foundation for his understanding of human development and psychodynamics has important implications. The outcome of this choice is a theory in which shame and guilt are central to the human condition. This is because the story of Oedipus is an undeniable tragedy, and the transgression it symbolizes is unambiguously and universally condemned. There is nothing nuanced and nothing redeemable about even fantasizing about killing one’s father and entering into a sexual or marital liaison with one’s mother. If, indeed, as Freud claimed, the Oedipus complex is universal, it appears that we all must repress our most basic instinct and effectively surrender to our guilt and shame. We will return to this question later in this paper.

While there is little doubt that the dynamic of prohibition/transgression is present in parent–child relationships and is a critically important factor in human life, the notion that this dynamic originates exclusively (or even primarily) in the son’s incestuous sexual drive for the mother and rivalry with the father fails to account for the wide range of prohibition/transgression conflicts that occur both within the family and in the wider society. It stretches credulity to argue that even all conflicts within the family, especially those that involve the child’s and adolescent’s transgressive assertion of autonomy, are sexual (indeed incestuous!) in nature. It is no wonder that many post-Freudian psychoanalysts have effectively ignored the Oedipus complex and focused upon such “preoedipal” issues as separation-individuation (Mahler et al. 1973). Freud himself had opened the door to this when, in an article on “Female Sexuality”, he conceded that, at least in women, the fear of “object loss” was a source of anxiety that preceded the Oedipal phase (Freud 1931, pp. 225–43). Later investigators, including Rank ([1929] 1994), Bowlby (1973), Mahler (1968), Fromm (1951), and Stoller (1973, pp. 241–51), held that anxiety over separation (for Rank, “birth trauma”, and in Fromm’s case, separation from the father) is more significant than Oedipal/sexual anxiety, and several, such as Fromm-Reichmann (1950) and Horney (1939), viewed hostility and conflicts between aggression vs. dependency strivings to be more significant than sexuality in child development. Others, turning, for example, to the writings of Balint (1968), Fairbairn (1952), Winnicott (1965), Kernberg (1967, pp. 641–85), and Kohut (1971), have held that while Oedipal issues are important in the neuroses, “preoedipal” issues predominate in psychosis and borderline states.

It is important to note that Jung was perhaps the first to hold that the need for separation from the mother and not the desire for her and concomitant fear of the father was the dynamic behind what Freud saw in the Oedipus complex. Indeed, Jung rejected the sexual understanding of the origin of neuroses and increasingly focused on the importance of separating from the parents, especially the mother (Jung 1967, vol. 5, par. 522), and what he later referred to as “individuation”, which involves the shedding of the “persona” and the development of a unique, autonomous “self” (Jung 1966, vol. 7, par. 269).1 In what follows, I argue that, while Jung only hinted at this in his writings, his views on individuation, as well as the psychological dynamic of transgression and prohibition (which the Oedipus myth purports to explain) is better understood in the context of a myth we are all familiar with—the transgression of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. As we will see, not only Jung but Erich Fromm and other post-Freudians provided an interpretation of the Eden narrative in which autonomy and individuation are highlighted as critical to both human development and psychotherapy.

2. Freud and Jung on Eden

It is noteworthy that neither Freud nor Jung placed their sustained psychological gaze on the Eden story, the foundational myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition and a myth that clearly embodies the prohibition/transgression dynamic, which, according to traditional Jewish and Christian interpretations of this myth, explains the human predicament.

In a letter written to Jung on 17 December 1911, Freud expressed extreme skepticism regarding the possibility of interpreting the biblical Eden narrative in psychological terms. Jung had written to Freud requesting that he provide “some detailed remarks” regarding Freud’s “objections to [Jung’s] method of dealing with mythology, (Freud and Jung 1994, pp. 470–71, Letter 287) and in a letter dated 17 December 1911, Freud responded:

You have asked me for an example of my objections to the most obvious method of exploiting mythology. I shall give you an example … Fräulein Spielrein had cited the Genesis story of the apple as an instance of woman seducing man. But in all likelihood the myth of Genesis is a wretched, tendentious distortion devised by an apprentice priest, who as we now know stupidly wove two independent sources into a single narrative (as in a dream). It is not impossible that there are two sacred trees because he found one tree in each of the two sources. There is something very strange and singular about the creation of Eve—Rank recently called my attention to the fact that the Bible story may quite have reversed the original myth. Then everything would be clear; Eve would be Adam’s mother, and we should be dealing with the well known motif of mother incest, the punishment for which, etc. Equally strange is the motif of the woman giving the man an agent of fruitfulness (pomegranate) to eat. But if the story is reversed, we can again have something familiar. The man giving the woman a fruit to eat, is an old marriage, rite (cf the story of Proserpina, condemned to remain in Hades as Pluto’s wife). Consequently, I hold that the surface versions of myths cannot be used uncritically for comparison with our psychoanalytical findings. We must find our way back to their latent, original forms by a comparative method that illuminates the distortions they have undergone in the course of their history…

(Freud and Jung 1994, p. 473, Letter 288)

It is of some interest that Freud here not only dismisses the possibility of a direct psychological interpretation of the Eden narrative but also finds it necessary to alter it so as to comport with the Oedipus complex, but the message to Jung was quite clear: any psychological interpretation of the manifest content of “the Genesis story of the apple” would, in Freud’s view, be fruitless.

Jung, late in his career, devoted a long chapter to Adam and Eve in his Mysterium Coniunctionis, but there he dwells on Adam as a symbol of the “self” and barely touches upon the first humans’ transgression and their expulsion from paradise. However, one can turn to several scattered passages in Jung’s writings to see that he was not dissuaded by Freud’s warning and that he endeavored to provide a psychological interpretation of Adam and Eve’s “original sin.”

In “Commentaries”, a manuscript Jung wrote in connection with chapters 9–11 of Liber Primus, and which is published as “Appendix B” in The Red Book, Jung writes:

Wherever Logos rules, there is order but too much persistence. The allegory of paradise, where there is no struggle and, therefore, no development, is fitting here. In this condition, the repressed movement degenerates, and its value is lost. …Only disobedience against the ruling principle leads out of this condition of undeveloped persistence. The story of paradise repeats itself, and hence, the serpent winds its way up the tree because Adam should be led into temptation.

(Jung 2009, p. 366)

And in Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, we read:

Since the better is always the enemy of the good, every drastic innovation is an infringement of what is traditionally right, and may sometimes even be a crime punishable by death. As we know, this dilemma played an important part in the psychology of early Christianity, at the time when it came into conflict with Jewish law. In the eyes of the Jews, Christ was undoubtedly a law-breaker. Not unjustly is he called Adam Secundus; for just as the first Adam became conscious through sin, through eating of the tree of knowledge, so the second Adam broke through to the necessary relation with a fundamentally different God.

(Jung n.d., Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works, par. 396)

Here, we should recall that for Jung, the significance of Christ in both The Red Book and later writings is that Christ sees fit to go his own way and find his own meaning. We read in The Red Book that Christ’s life teaches us that individuals must take their lives “into their own hands, faithful to their own essence and their own love” (Jung 2009, The Red Book. p. 356a). Further, Christ’s “work would be completed if men managed to live their own lives without imitation” (Jung 2009, The Red Book. p. 356b). Years later, in “Is Analytic Psychology a Religion”, Jung wrote: “We all must do what Christ did. We must do our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life” (McGuire and Hull 1977, p. 98). Christ, as the “second Adam”, the “lawbreaker”, transgresses as a means of pointing the way for all individuals to find their own paths. These passages provide us with a key not only to Jung’s understanding of Christ, “the second Adam”, but, in the current context, his understanding of the transgression of Adam and Eve. For Jung, the first humans’ transgression involves a “disobedience against the ruling principle”, one that leads to consciousness through sin, the fulfillment of possibilities, and a path towards individuation.

In his late life memoir Memory, Dreams, Reflections (Jung 1961, pp. 36–41), Jung recounted a childhood episode in which he came to believe that God wanted Adam and Eve to sin and that God himself is ultimately transgressive. Jung relates that when he was age 12, he had a blasphemous thought that he struggled to keep out of his mind. He then thought of the transgression of Adam and Eve, who “committed the first sin by doing what God did not want them to do”, and it suddenly became clear to him that “God in His omniscience had arranged everything so that the first parents would have to sin.” (Jung 1961, p. 38). It was after this realization that Jung came to the conclusion that God desired that he summon the courage to think his blasphemous thought (Jung 1961, pp. 38–39). Later, we will see that toward the end of his life, when he wrote Answer to Job, Jung realized that his own understanding of “the fall” was in accord with a similar kabbalistic interpretation of the Eden narrative (Jung 1960, pp. 48–53).

3. Understanding the Eden Narrative

From a psychological perspective, the critical narrative elements of the first humans’ transgression are that (1) God created Adam and Eve in His own image and likeness (Genesis 1:27, 7, 5:1); (2) He commanded Adam and Eve on pain of death not to eat from or even touch the tree in the midst of the garden (2:17); (3) the serpent claimed that the motive for this command was that God knew if they were to eat from the tree their eyes would open and like God, they would know good and evil (3:5); (4) Eve, seeing that the fruit was desirable to eat and also for wisdom, succumbed to the temptation posed by the serpent (3:16); (5) both Eve and Adam transgressed the divine command and ate from the tree (3:6); (6) they were punished for their transgression with the pain of hard work, childbirth, mortality, and expulsion from the idyllic conditions of Eden (3:16–19, 24); and (7) it is only after the expulsion that Adam named his wife Eve, who would now “become the mother of all the living” (3:20).

Thus, even on its face, as a result of the first humans’ transgression, there is a transformation of their (and hence all human) reality, such that they become fully conscious, know good and evil (and consequently have the capacity to choose between them), must endure mortality, suffering, and hard labor, and become the progenitors of future generations. In short, the biblical narrative provides us with an anthropology, one in which, as a result of transgression, the key elements of the human condition—self-consciousness, ethical choice, work, suffering, mortality, and reproduction—take form. Indeed, it is through their transgression that Adam and Eve become human. While shame and guilt are certainly present in the Eden narrative, these are secondary to the transformations in human reality that result from the first human’s “sin”.

I should point out that the dialectic of transgression, punishment, and transformation is but one way through which the Eden narrative has traditionally been read. Here, I need not go into detail regarding the traditional Christian interpretation that Adam and Eve’s disobedience constituted the “fall of man”, thus necessitating the advent of a redeemer in Jesus Christ. This notion is echoed by the Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (CE 37-c. 100), who, in his Jewish Antiquities (1.46), emphasized the evil inherent in the forbidden fruit and the “evil conscience” (rather than knowledgeable one) that resulted from partaking of it. The Eden narrative has also been understood as a rupture in the harmony between humankind and the world. Prior to the first humans’ transgression, Adam and Eve are, with one exception, given dominion over every living creature and are provided with every seed-bearing plant…every tree that has fruit…for food (Genesis 1:128, 29). However, subsequent to their partaking of the forbidden fruit, God tells Adam that because of him, the ground will be cursed, and only through painful toil will he eat food from it (Genesis 3:17). As we will see, however, this understanding of a rupture between humankind and the world was/is, according to later kabbalistic interpretations of the Eden narrative, a necessary condition for humans exercising their knowledge and freedom in realizing values and the redemption and perfection of the world.

4. The Eden Complex

The “complex” delineated by Adam and Eve’s transgression and expulsion from the idyllic conditions of Eden has profound psychological implications. Osmond, writing from a Freudian (and, in my view, apologetic) psychoanalytic perspective, attempts to assimilate Oedipal theory to preoedipal conflicts. Osmond views the transgression of Adam and Eve as depicting an “archaic version of the Oedipus complex”, in which the “separation and individuation” of Adam and Eve produces a crisis within themselves but also in God, who, for Freud, is a metaphor for the father (Osmond 2000). Such separation/individuation is, according to Osmond, a necessary phase that transforms the dependent child and places her on the path to becoming a mature and autonomous adult.

I think that a certain sleight of hand is necessary to assimilate what I am calling “the Eden Complex” to the Freudian Oedipus complex. As we have seen, Freud himself made a half-hearted and convoluted effort to interpret the Eden narrative in Oedipal terms by claiming, without warrant, that the biblical text is corrupt and that Eve may well have been Adam’s mother! (Freud and Jung 1994, p. 211) Osmond, however, is on target when he suggests that the story of the Garden of Eden reflects the vicissitudes of the separation-individuation of the child. Freud wrote, “psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modeled after the father …and that god at the bottom is nothing but an exalted father” (Freud 1919, pp. 242–43). This perspective leads to the conclusion that the transgression in the Eden narrative represents an act of disobedience against the father (or parents), one which results in paternal anger and disappointment, and punishment and suffering for the child, but also the child’s maturation, coming into knowledge and autonomy.

However, this is a stark difference from the Oedipus complex, in that whereas the Oedipal transgression must be suppressed (and repressed) in order to ensure the integrity of the family and society, the Eden transgression must become fully conscious in order to ensure that the child attains the knowledge, awareness, and autonomy required for the transition to adulthood. This is why it is ultimately impossible to assimilate the latter into the former; the Oedipus complex ends in repression, and the Eden Complex ends in consciousness and liberation. While both complexes produce psychological suffering for the child, the Oedipus complex results in repression and obedience to the law, while the Eden Complex potentially results in liberation and autonomy in the context of the law. Indeed, a potential outcome of the Eden transgression reflects the view of Nietzsche that as individuals, “we…want to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!” (Nietzsche 2001, Section 335, p. 189). Thus, Adam and Eve’s transgression might be understood as a Promethean-like heroic grasp for autonomy (Hogeterp 2023).2 However, we must remember that in the relationship between parent and child, the child’s initial acts of autonomy are neither heroic nor based upon a knowing quest for freedom. Rather, they are often impulsive, unrealistic, done under negative peer influence, and even self-defeating. Yet they serve the function of bringing the child into an Eden-like conflict with the parents, which can serve as an initial basis for what will become mature adult autonomy.

5. Fromm and Birnbaum on the Eden Narrative

There have been others in the fields of both psychology and theology who have challenged the traditional reading of the expulsion from Eden as a “fall” and viewed it as reflecting a necessary event on the path to human autonomy and growth. Erich Fromm, in his classic work Escape from Freedom, wrote:

Man is forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He acts against God’s command, he breaks through the state of harmony of which he is a part without transcending it. From the standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God’s orders means freeing himself from coercion, emerging from the unconscious existence of prehuman life to the level of man. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act…The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason.

(Fromm 1941, p. 33)

Fromm held that the expulsion was instrumental in the development of human values. After Eden,

There is only one possible solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free an independent individual.

(Fromm 1941, p. 35)

The Jewish theologian David Birnbaum developed a very similar set of ideas from a theological perspective. According to Birnbaum, “Two possible but mutually exclusive sets of dynamics were open to man (at Eden)” (Birnbaum 1989, p. 61). The first, symbolized by the “Tree of Life”, was a life of eternal life, bliss, dependence, lesser dignity, and limited potential; the second, symbolized by the “Tree of Knowledge”, was a life of mortality, pain and joy, independence, greater dignity, and infinite potential. According to Birnbaum, because both humanity and cosmos are predicated and can only be complete through the realization of potential, “man inexorably took the route of ‘Tree of Knowledge/Potential” (Birnbaum 1989, p. 61).

6. The Range of the Eden Complex

As we have seen, the Oedipus complex has been subject to critique on the grounds that it reduces the prohibition/transgression dynamic to the specific instance of the son’s desire for the mother and rivalry with the father. The Eden Complex, I would argue, insofar as it is broader, more thoroughly represents the dialectic between prohibition and transgression, submission and autonomy, control and freedom, and tradition and innovation that lies at the heart of intrapsychic as well as interpersonal and societal conflict. It is also far more congenial to the actualization of the self. While, as per the Oedipus complex, there are certainly transgressions that must be repressed in favor of an internalization of the moral law, there are other transgressions that require expression as a means and path toward individuation.

In contrast to the Oedipus complex, the “Eden Complex” is not only operative in the relationship between parent and child but is present in virtually every human conflict where control vs. autonomy is at stake. It is evident in family and community relations and also in science and art whenever a proposed innovation meets with disapproval from a sanctioning individual or group. In this sense, it is more universal than the Oedipus complex, which, at least in its original formulation, is limited to conflicts regarding a single aspect of sexual and libidinal desire.

The Eden Complex shows itself explicitly and frequently in psychotherapy. Think of psychotherapy clients who declare a sexual preference that alienates them from their families, leave their church or otherwise abandon their religion, pursue a career that meets with family disapproval, adopt a political position that places them in opposition to their community, or adhere to a scientific or other theory that meets with the scorn of their peers.

7. Transgression and Values

On first hearing, the idea that individuation is predicated on transgression raises the question of whether this undermines ethics and values. However, far from obliterating values, transgression is often a condition for their full realization. Moses’ defiance of Pharaoh’s divine authority was necessary before he could receive the Decalogue and Torah; Jesus challenged the Mosaic law as a prelude to religious reform. Acts of civil disobedience were an essential prelude to the demise of world colonialism and the advent of civil rights legislation in the United States. However, such transgressions bring with them an ethical and axiological responsibility.

Jung writes that in analysis, “resistance arises from the demand for individuation, which is against all adaptation to others.” However, “the breaking of the patient’s previous personal conformity” results in “the destruction of an aesthetic and moral ideal”, and for this reason, “the first step in individuation is a tragic guilt” (Jung 1977, par. 1094). Jung writes:

Individuation cuts one off from personal conformity and, hence, from collectivity. That is the guilt which the individual leaves behind him for the world; that is the guilt he must endeavor to redeem. He must offer a ransom in place of himself; that is, he must bring forth values which are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective personal sphere. Without this production of values, final individuation is immoral and, more than that, suicidal. The man who cannot create values should sacrifice himself consciously to the spirit of collective conformity. In so doing, he is free to choose the collectivity to which he will sacrifice himself. Only to the extent that a man creates objective values can he and may he individuate.

(Jung 1977, par. 1095)

Thus, it is not an act of transgression per se that leads to individuation but, according to Jung, transgression in the service of creating new objective values. Tragically, however, the first humans failed to create the new objective values that were, as a result of their disobedience, potentially within their reach. This is because they, especially Adam, failed to take responsibility for his defiant act. As we know, Adam attempted to place the blame on Eve: “The woman you put at my side—she gave me of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). Thus, it is not only the assertion of one’s freedom that leads to what Jung referred to as “individuation” but (as per Buber and Levinas) taking responsibility, and, moreover, empathically listening and responding to the other, a lesson that had (has) yet to be learned by humanity (Cf. Pinkas 2023).3

8. Jung and the Kabbalistic Understanding of Eden

Late in his life, Jung took an interest in certain kabbalistic symbols and ideas relevant to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and the relationship between transgression and values. In Answer to Job, originally published in 1952, (Jung 1960, pp. 48, 73), Jung observed that God had “banished Adam and Eve, whom he had created as images of his masculine essence and his feminine emanation, to the extra-paradisial world, the limbo of the ‘shards’ (Jung 1960, p. 53). Jung wrote that as a result of this banishment, there arose a “new factor that has never occurred before in the history of the world, the unheard-of fact that, without knowing it or wanting it, a mortal man is raised by his moral behavior above the stars in heaven, from which position of advantage he can behold the back of Yahweh, the abysmal world of ‘shards’” (Jung 1960, p. 48), which, as he explains, is “an allusion to an idea found in the later cabalistic philosophy”(Jung 1960, p. 206).4 And in 1954, in a letter to Reverend Erastus Evans, Jung wrote: “In a tract of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the remarkable idea is developed that man is destined to become God’s helper in the attempt to restore the vessels which were broken when God thought to create a world” (Adler and Jaffé 1973, vol. 2, pp. 33–34). In these passages, Jung makes an obscure reference to the Kabbalah of the school of Isaac Luria (1534–1572), which understood the Eden narrative as symbolic of a critical moment in the creation, redemption, and perfection of both God and the world. In order to obtain insight into Jung’s thought here, it will be instructive to briefly examine Luria’s symbolism in the context of our consideration of the Eden Complex.

Luria and his disciples held that the first humans’ transgression produced a cosmic cataclysm, the “breaking of the vessels”, which involved the displacement and/or shattering of the sefirot, the divine value archetypes of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, kindness, beauty, etc. that were to serve as the elements of creation in an original Eden world. As a result of this shattering, symbolized in Adam and Eve’s transgression, sparks (nitzotzot) of divine light from the sefirot were encased in “shells” produced from the shards of the broken vessels and fell through the metaphysical void into the dark, evil realm of the “other side” (what Jung refers to as “the back of Yahweh”), which itself comes to penetrate and even dominate our world.

As described by Shaul Magid, the Lurianic Kabbalah posits three phases of cosmic history (Magid 2008). The first, resulting from the initial act of tzimtzum (the divine contraction preparatory to creation) results in a flaw in the world that was to be rectified during the week of creation as it is described in the book of Genesis. However, the “sin” of Adam and Eve produced a second rupture and a more profound flaw in the cosmos that could no longer be rectified by a process that God had “woven into the fabric of nature.” As a result, a third stage of creation was necessitated, within which humanity would become responsible for restoring and indeed emendating the broken vessels and, hence, repairing and indeed emending the world (tikkun ha-olam). The transgression of Adam and Eve thus resulted in a cosmic transformation, the advent of a new, non-natural form of destruction and evil but also the opportunity, occasioned by humanity’s partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and good and evil, for a new form of good, resulting from their newly obtained knowledge and free will.

According to the Lurianists, human spiritual, ethical, and intellectual acts have the power to extract the sparks from the shells and, in the process, re-actualize the sefirot in a manner that would have never been possible had they not shattered, and in Luria’s understanding of the biblical narrative, had Adam and Eve not transgressed and remained in Eden. We can say that this is because only in a post-Eden “broken” world of suffering labor, strife, and death can the value elements of creation become fully real. Indeed, as Adin Steinsaltz suggested, only in a “post-transgression” world of suffering can kindness, compassion, and morality be actualized, and only in a world where truth is obscured can wisdom be attained (Drob and Tilevits 1990). The Lurianists went so far as to hold that by “raising the sparks” that fell because of the first human’s transgression, human beings become, as Jung notes, partners with God in creation, elevate the world to a higher plane of value and, moreover, help to fully actualize God Himself, whose essential “goodness” is only fully realized in the activities of humankind. It is for this reason, as Jung observed, as a result of the first humans’ transgression and their expulsion from Eden, that “mortal man is raised by his moral behavior above the stars in heaven.” It is also fully in accord with Jung’s view that the individual who breaks from the values of the collective is in a position to create new “objective values” as a means toward becoming a fully individuated self.

The Lurianists held that the dynamic of transgression and restoration is not only written into the very nature of the human soul but also into the essence of God himself. Shaul Magid suggests that for Luria, the sin of Adam and Eve was a reflection of the deity—as the human is created in the image (tzelem) of the divine (Magid 2008, p. 38). And as we have just seen, according to Luria, the deity (Ein-sof) only completes itself by virtue of the “breaking of the vessels” and their restoration, which actualizes the fulfillment of the values that were only implicit in Ein-sof “prior” to creation.

9. Eden, Sexuality, and Transgression

We have seen that the Eden Complex differs from the Oedipus complex inasmuch as it suggests that the transgression that gives birth to the psyche is broader than the family sexual drama posited by Freud. Still, it has been suggested that the Eden narrative carries sexual motifs: among them, the seduction by the serpent, the fruit that is “pleasing to the eye”, and the shame of nakedness.

Interestingly, Luria and his disciples viewed sexual sin as the paradigm of transgression and sexual union (or re-union) as the archetypal symbol of transformative restoration. Luria’s major expositor, Chayyim Vital, reinterprets the transgression of Adam and Eve in sexual terms. According to Vital, Eve’s transgression was not in her partaking of the forbidden fruit per se, but rather her being seduced and impregnated by the serpent; (Magid 2008, p. 56) Adam’s transgression was that having gazed upon this abominable act, he was sexually aroused by it and committed the sin of “spilling his seed” (Magid 2008, pp. 63–64). Indeed, Luria went so far as to hold that Adam’s son Cain was tainted because he was (somehow) a product of Adam’s masturbatory act (Magid 2008, pp. 60–61).5

These transgressions, while not Oedipal in nature, are, in the Lurianic rendering, sexual, and it is worth noting that Luria envisioned the emendation (tikkun) for these and all other transgressions, and, hence, the restoration of the displaced and broken vessels, in cosmic-erotic terms as the reconciliation of and intercourse between the masculine and feminine aspects of the deity, symbolized by the return to a “face to face” (panim el panim) of the celestial mother and father (Abba and Imma) and the youthful male and his consort (Zeir Anpin and Nukvah). With each transgression, the vessels are displaced and/or ruptured, and male and female turn their backs on one another. However, acts of tikkun restore and emend the vessels (i.e., the archetypes of mind and value), and there is a symbolic return to a face-to-face conjugal encounter. Interestingly, it is this very kabbalistic union of masculine and feminine divine principles that Jung personally experienced in his 1944 “kabbalistic vision”, a vision he understood to be a profound symbol of individuation and the completion of the self.

However, it is important to note that Jung held that sexuality serves as a symbol for the full range of human motivation, including the drive for meaning and spiritual fulfillment. That the kabbalists also understood the sexual in such symbolic terms is evident in the fact that they saw the breaking of the vessels and the separation of male and female repeating itself throughout biblical (and later Jewish) history: in the flood, the “death of the kings” of Edom (in Genesis 36:331), the worship of the golden calf, Moses’ killing of the Egyptian, his destruction of the tablets and striking of the rock, the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem, etc. Each of these events is captured symbolically by the symbol of erotic separation, and yet each reflects a transgression or disaster of much wider implications. Certainly, the sexual, inasmuch as it involves a profound drive that is necessary for the very survival of the species and is subject to societal prohibitions and intense shame and guilt, has all the ingredients to make it a central archetypal, even metaphysical, symbol. And yet, despite its centrality, as Jung (and the kabbalists) well understood, sexuality has the capacity to symbolize much that goes far beyond itself. It is noteworthy that while Eve’s interaction with the serpent has a seductive quality that has been understood in sexual terms, the biblical narrative assigns non-sexual motives for her transgression: “the fruit of the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (Genesis 3:6). The Eden Complex, inasmuch as it encompasses human motivation that includes, but goes beyond, the sexual, is highly consistent with Jung’s broad, not exclusively sexual, view of the libido.

10. Transgression in Freud and Jung

In developing their respective views of the human psyche, both Freud and Jung contravened various rules and boundaries and, in effect, created their theories by transgressing the mores of their times. Freud transgressed these mores in his claim that children are sexual beings who have sexual desires for their parents, and for a time, he brought the disapproval of the scientific establishment upon him by holding that his patients had been sexually abused, often at the hands of their own fathers. Indeed, according to some of his critics, Freud ultimately found this scorn so overwhelming that he withdrew his “seduction hypothesis” and took sexual abuse out of the reality of the family and inserted it into the fantasies of the child. (This, however, involved a new transgression.) Finally, Freud’s lifelong atheism and his view that religion is an illusion “comparable to a childhood neurosis”, (Freud 1961, p. 53) was, at least for its time, and especially for those in the religious establishment, highly transgressive.

In contrast to Freud, Jung not only entered into various actual and theoretical transgressions but also made transgression one of the cornerstones of his psychology. The Red Book, which Jung composed over a number of years after his break with Freud in 1913, records active imaginations, fantasies, and visions in which Jung transgresses a range of laws, boundaries, and limits. Further, each of these transgressions is understood by Jung as an advance on his path toward his own individuation and serves in a general manner as exemplars for our own development. For example, Jung envisions himself participating in the murder of the hero Siegfried as a means of overcoming the tendency to view his own ego in heroic terms (Jung 2009, The Red Book, p. 241b ff). Other of his Red Book transgressions serve as a corrective for the tendency to over-value one pole of a dichotomy, e.g., meaning/nonsense, sanity/madness, reason/magic, order/chaos, or male/female. As such, Jung advocates for the importance of nonsense (Jung 2009, The Red Book, p. 229b), finds himself being declared mentally ill in a psychiatric hospital (Jung 2009, The Red Book, p. 295a), goes on a quest to unlearn reason and learn magic (Jung 2009, The Red Book, pp. 313b–314a), disparages the value of science, eats the liver of a dead child (!) (Jung 2009, The Red Book, p. 209b), and suggests that men dress themselves in the clothing of women (Jung 2009, The Red Book, pp. 263b–314a). Jung insults a Christian anchorite by worshipping a scarab and the sun god Helios (Jung 2009, The Red Book, pp. 271–72) and commits the sacrilegious act of having Salome declare him to be “Christ”(Jung 2009, The Red Book, p. 252b)

While Jung’s conflict with Freud has been described as an “Oedipal struggle” (Alexander 1982) it hardly comports with either the Oedipus myth or Freud’s own understanding of the Oedipus complex. Certainly, Jung challenged Freud’s authority, and it is even possible that Jung saw Freud as a father figure, but there is no competition for maternal affection. Jung may have had fantasies of “killing” Freud (consider his murder of “Siegfried” in The Red Book (Jung 2009, p. 241b ff) but this was in order to go his own way (as he actually did after leaving the psychoanalytic fold), not as a means of gaining the affection of some purported maternal object. In 1912, as Jung was realizing that he could no longer be an adherent of the psychoanalytic movement, he sent Freud a letter in which he quoted Nietzsche’s Zarathustra:

One repays a teacher badly, if one remains only a pupil … You had not yet sought yourselves when you found me…Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves: And only when you have all denied me will I return to you.

(McGuire 1974, p. 492)6

As we have seen, prior to his break with Freud, Jung suggested that not only the Oedipus story but other myths are of deep psychological significance, and Freud clearly cautioned him against this approach. The reasons for Jung’s break with Freud are complex (See Donn 1988) and cannot be detailed here. However, one factor that contributed to their split was Jung’s uneasiness with Freud’s reception of his efforts to broaden the psychoanalytic analysis of mythology.

11. Conclusions: Eden and Oedipus Revisited

We are now in a position to return to the contrast between Eden and Oedipus, with which we began, and make some concluding remarks. Freud claimed to base his Oedipus complex on the original Oedipus myth. While he wrote that Sophocles’ play “Oedipus Rex” continues to move us because we recognize our earliest sexual impulses towards our mother in it, he held that the “primordial urges and fears” are most clearly exhibited in the original myth, which was modified by Sophocles for his own theological purposes (Freud 1965, pp. 294 ff). Nevertheless, it can be argued that a full reading of the Oedipus narrative, especially if interpreted through Sophocles’ dramatic trilogy, by bringing us beyond the guilt and shame of Freud’s interpretation, leads us to conclude that the Oedipus complex cannot be so readily dismissed on the grounds that it leaves no opening for anything beyond these negative affects and the internalization of the law of the father. Here, it is important to note that Sophocles’ Oedipus is not simply a man who kills his father to marry his mother, but one who is fated to do so unintentionally. He was an essentially honorable man who was brought down by a tragic fate and who had the inner strength to pursue the truth, even if at maximum personal cost. Indeed, a close reading of the Oedipus myth, as narrated by Sophocles, points to the inevitability of human suffering and the limits of human freedom.

These tragic aspects of human life are also reflected in the Eden narrative, as the consequences of the first human transgressions result in their suffering and, ultimately, their mortality. Whether conceived of as a tale of divine punishment or as the natural consequences of the self-reflective knowledge gained through their partaking of the forbidden fruit, the Eden narrative, much like the Oedipus narrative, results in the protagonists’ anguish and despair. However, while Oedipus ends in utter tragedy, Adam and Eve emerge into a world of adult human endeavor, a world of mixed joy and suffering. After God declares the consequences of their disobedience, both Adam and Eve respond with what can be described as a celebration of human life. Adam immediately “names his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all living” (3:20), and soon, after the first humans are expelled from the garden, Adam makes love to Eve, she gives birth to Cain, and she says, “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man”. (4:1). This, as we know, is followed by the birth of Abel and the first murder, which is certainly a testament to the potential depths of human tragedy and suffering, but with this, the human story continues. Adam and Eve are blessed with another child, Seth, and Eve says, “God has granted me another son in place of Abel, since Cain killed him” (Genesis 4:25). There is then, at the beginning of Genesis 5, a reiteration that God created both men and women in the likeness of God. As the rest of the very human story in the bible unfolds, we find that while much results from divine decree, a great portion is given to human choice and decision. The knowledge and autonomy that was granted Eve and Adam in the garden does not guarantee a happy and fulfilling resolution of the “Eden Complex”, but it provides the foundation for human endeavor and the potential for humans’ participation in the redemption of themselves and the world. The Eden narrative is extremely brief and certainly does not have the dramatic structure of the Oedipus trilogy. However, in comparison to the Oedipus narrative, it is more optimistic, as it leaves open the possibility of redemption in the face of hardship and death. Oedipus may achieve a certain realization of self in the psychoanalytic sense, but it is hardly a redemptive outcome. Sophocles’ trilogy ends with catastrophe, “self-harm, fratricide, patricide, and suicide”. The Eden narrative ends with the promise of new life and of a new beginning.