Consider how well the Christian account of the human predicament coincides with that of depth therapy. Our first parents knew they were naked; the sound of God made them afraid because they were certain the divine arrival would mean death. They sewed fig-leaves to cover themselves and they hid, condemning themselves to a life of anxiety and avoidance. 

But – somehow confident in God’s goodness – they came out into the open, neither trying to cover themselves nor to hide; they moved towards God, trusting that ‘death’ at God’s hands would be better than ‘life’ elsewhere. 

Life calls us into the presence of God—the deep and real; a place of honesty, vulnerability, and intimacy—but, knowing that we are naked, we are afraid that being in the presence of God would mean death. So we live a (false self) life of continuing anxiety (inhibitory emotions) and of defenses (ways of keeping God and the ‘deep and real’ out of awareness).

The path to maturity is the path of the cross—turning against our defenses, letting go of our fig-leaves, and submitting ourselves to the death of the false self. In the economy of God, such an (immature- or false-self) death-descent proves to be the gateway to (mature and true-self) life-ascent.