Sunday, February 17, 2008

Was interested running into 'trespass' as the action of Adam in the Garden of Eve noted in Genesis. Currently this is in the litpress.org presentation; the Bible passage is part of the liturgy for the First Sunday of Lent. 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us' finally has a suitable context. Freud proposed an idea in Totem and Taboo which I imagine as like something out of 2001 A Space Odyssey: that the original human groups were like a monkey colony in which the father kept the sons from the females until the brothers would rise up and kill the father and then have the possibility of 'satisfaction.' The law of talion for this would of necessity be death for the perpetrator, the punishment specified in the Bible. Interestingly (to me), the ages of the first fathers noted in Genesis run into the 900s as if to say, 'We didn't kill them. Look how long they lived.' More generally a 'trespass' would be any stage, e.g. oral or phallic, psychosexual satisfaction of necessity accompanied by aggression, for instance the oral aggression of an infant who bites to destroy an object who frustrates him. The residue of the initial hypothetical murder is suggested to be religion which carries forward the laws of the father. No wonder 'Forgive us our trespasses' is so relevant to family life as it would deal with psychosexual urges both real and imagined.

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