SOURCE: “Then Men Said, ‘Let Us Make God in Our Image, After Our Likeness’,” Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXI, No. 2, 1971, pp. 69-79.

In the following essay, Gonen analyzes the analogous relationship between Genesis's account of man's nature, and psychoanalytic ideas regarding man's nature. Gonen concludes that the description of God in Genesis reflects man's own image of what he is and what he would like to be.

The story of man's banishment from the Garden of Eden has fascinated many thinkers who discovered a variety of meanings in the story. For example, Erikson (1950) sees this banishment as symbolizing the first ontogenetic catastrophe which occurs with teething. He asserts that at this particular point of time, the mother figure—the blissful and nourishing maternal environment which was always with the infant and which he trusted up to that time—begins to separate from him in response to his...