By definition, from an atheist point of view, Jesus cannot be considered as the son of God. Therefore, some of his statements, reported in the Gospels, appear to be particularly insane. Let us quote:
•"The Father is in me and I am in the Father."
•"I am the bread of life that comes down from heaven."
•"He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life."
A first question arises: what was the psychic illness of the one who uttered such words? Based on the Gospels, the author follows Jesus in his daily life, in his actions and words. This investigation reveals Jesus' pathologies: schizophrenia (he withdraws from the world and builds another one in its place), anal character (a stage of infantile development characterized by a binary Manicheism; let us remember that "he who is not with me is against me," and an extreme concern for order), aggressive paranoia. Finally, Jesus can be diagnosed clinically as a "mega-paranoid," i.e., a paranoid producing mythical projections.
Jesus was phenomenally successful during his lifetime and over the centuries. At this point, another question arises: How did he manage to convince the crowds? For the author, the mythical projections of Jesus came to speak directly to the unconscious of the crowds. The obsessive neuroses present in this collective and individual unconscious were channeled into the promises of Jesus who assured, in exchange for belief in his person, purification, eternal life, and social reversal. The key to the success of Jesus would thus reside in a fortuitous meeting between structures of the unconscious. These structures remaining identical through time explains the timeless success of Christianity.
With humor and erudition, Frédéric Joi offers us a rational explanation of mass religious behavior that he does not hesitate to bring closer to the contemporary political field and the concept of crowd manipulation. To conclude his essay, he proposes, in the form of a questionnaire, to test the capacity of each one to be a prophet!
