May Your Kingship Come: Psychoanalyzing the Lord's Prayer

ABSTRACT The Lord's Prayer is a paradigm of early Christian practice and pivotal to a wide variety of theologies, exegeses, ethics, and church practice from the beginnings of Christianity to the present day. Read psychoanalytically, the brief ten‐line prayer implicates the father, the sacred name, the siblings, the father's desire, forgiveness, existential anxiety, trial, deliverance from oppression, glory, and power. This essay is a psychoanalytically thick description of the prayer. A close reading of the Greek text reveals a metaphor for a future kingship, addressing a father and entangling themes of sublimation, castration, the symptom, perversion, neurosis, and psychosis; in short, the human condition. This essay argues that the discourse of the Lord's Prayer establishes a community with a father, implicating the supplicant to fulfill their infantile wishes, thought to exist in heaven, on earth.