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.