The Fall of Adam and the Depths of Primal Repression

Although the biblical narrative of the Fall of Man imbued the imagination of countless societies more profoundly than the Greek myth of Oedipus — etching a decisive mark upon Greece itself, evident in its conversion from paganism to Christianity — Sigmund Freud posited the Oedipal complex as the root of humanity’s “knowledge of good and evil”, without ever directly engaging the Fall narrative. To unearth deeper insights on the nature of sin, I brought Adam upon the couch of Freudian psychoanalysis. This inquiry uncovered a pre-Oedipal sense of guilt at least as grave as that of Oedipus: guilt towards the mother, arising from birth itself, intimately bound to the fear of death, and nourishing the Oedipal guilt. The “Fall of Man” is the fall of an “apple” from the womb. This finding is of import for psychoanalysis, education, theology and obstetrics.