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My brother Randy called this morning with the very bad news that my friend Phil Hanson had died in California, his obituary is in the morning paper. Phil and I spent hours playing together from elementary school years and Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts until we were on Denver’s Thomas Jefferson high school sophomore football team (I remember talking with Phil sitting at the counter at the Dolly Madison in University Hills shopping center about quitting the cross country team and joining him on the football team) and then we went in different directions. I’m grateful for the final time I saw Phil some 20 years ago, we had lunch and talked about how things had been for us, and how happy he was in his marriage and his business partnership with his dad. He was on my mind yesterday, as he often is. Good bye for now Phil, God bless and keep you.

And then I got this just now from my friend Dr. Robert Langs:

Dear John:

I am sending you the last blurb prepared by my publisher on the book--feel free to edit it if need be. I've asked that you be sent a copy and look forward to your reaction to it. In the meantime, I will appreciate your sending out the word on this book--it is I think a good book on the good book.

With best regards,

Bob

Beyond Yahweh and Jesus:
Bringing Death's Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and PsychoanalysisRobert Langs, M.D.
Latham, MD: Jason Aronson, October 2007.

Jason Aronson, Inc. is proud to announce the publication of one of the most exceptional books ever written about religion, its wide range of influence on human life, and its illuminating interactions with the fields of human psychology and psychoanalysis. Grounded in his new, adaptive approach to the human mind, in Beyond Yahweh and Jesus Langs has penned the first truly comprehensive psychoanalytic study of the Old (Hebrew) and New Testaments. Filled with surprising conjectures and unforeseen revelations, the book is remarkable in its insights and miraculous in the way it unifies religious and secular thinking, bringing wisdom to both believers and non-believers, the laity and mental health professionals alike.
The book is centered on God's role in enabling humans to cope with the fundamental problem of life—death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes, predatory, predator, and existential. The stage for this exploration is set with a comprehensive study of the story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the Lord God in Eden, a tale that Langs deftly reexamines in order to arrive at fresh insights into the emotion-related archetypes that are as much at the heart of Genesis as they are of life today. Yahweh is seen as tending to increase rather than diminish human death anxieties, while Christ is shown to have offered near-perfect solutions to each of its three types. The question arises as to why Christ has failed to bring peace to the world. Langs’ answer is focused on the absence of the psychological wisdom that religion needs to supplement its numinescent, spiritual wisdom—a void bemoaned by the Archbishop Temple of London as early as the mid-1800s and by Carl Jung in the 20th century.
The journey on which Langs' embarks takes the reader through an examination of the related topics of knowledge acquisition and divine wisdom, with its archetypal link to the explicit human awareness of death; fresh portraits of Yahweh and Jesus; the failure of psychoanalysis to provide religion with the depth psychology it needs to fulfill its mission; a set of propositions that are intended to bring this missing psychological wisdom to religion; and the conjecture that this effort will help to initiate the third chapter in the history of the Western God in which refashioned morality and divine wisdom will play notable roles.
The book also offers a foundation for secular forms of spirituality and morality, as well as for the broad human effort to cope with death and its incumbent anxieties, with or without religion. In addition to enhancing secular approaches to the archetypal challenges of life and death, Langs' primary mission in this book is a lofty but necessary one: to bring fresh dimensions and insights to religion so as to enable it to at long last contribute effectively to the human effort to bring peace to the world on both the personal and global levels.



Table of Contents

Author’s Note
Prologue: My Appointment in Samara
Chapter One. The First Question: God’s Answer
Chapter Two. The First Question: Eve’s Answer
Chapter Three. Death Anxiety and Divine Wisdom
Chapter Four. Augustine’s Version of Adam’s Sin
Chapter Five. Eve’s Motives
Chapter Six. Cain and Abel
Chapter Seven: Augustine’s Reliving of the Sin of Cain
Chapter Eight. The Failure to Master Death Anxiety: Yahweh
Chapter Nine. Resolving Death Anxiety: Jesus Christ
Chapter Ten. The Failure of Religious Beliefs
Chapter Eleven. Why Psychoanalysis Failed Religion
Chapter Twelve. The Future of Religious and Secular Spirituality

Robert Langs, M.D. is the author of 45 books and some 170 journal papers on issues pertaining to the vicissitudes of human emotional life.