ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has some claim to our interest for S. Freud argued that novel social institutions, particularly religious innovations, are simply individual psychopathology writ large, and that this psychopathology would ultimately be understood in naturalistic terms. This chapter describes how the experiences of a young woman during a brief psychotic episode associated with thyrotoxicosis and congestive cardiac failure were reinterpreted by her to become the charter of a new religious group; resonance with aspects of her experience became normative experiences for its members. The exile of the Jews at the beginning of the Christian era had scattered an autonomous nation with its religious identification with its own land into a series of complementary relationships with Christian and, later, Islamic communities. Religious ideas resonate with the personal experiences of those who adopt them, with their selves as embodied beings, physically experiencing their lives as well as comprehending them.
