Publisher's Synopsis
This book offers a wide-ranging review of art throughout the ages to isolate the original source of religions and religious practices within the symbiotic relationship between art production and universal ritual procedures. A psychoanalytic perspective identifies the creative process as the common factor and integral structure of not only the formation of the art object, but also ritual enactments and performance and, furthermore, religious doctrine and ceremony. The ritual creative process is unearthed as the unique prototype for the fundamental concept of death and resurrection that underpins religious belief. The book was written with the general reader in mind, but it will also be of interest to psychoanalytic researchers, art historians and art practitioners, as well as to theologians.
