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Abstract
The biblical account of Cain and Abel is not simply the narration of an exemplary fact, nor does it constitute a “clinical case” to be placed in a particular nosographic category. It is an allegory that derives from myth by reason of the lasting trace it has imprinted on the human psyche. Hence the legitimacy of the intersection between theology, anthropology and psychoanalysis underlying the analysis of the relationship between rivalry, envy and jealousy, as primordial emotions, on which the psychic “work” necessary to pass from shapeless drive chaos is called upon to exercise. In this sense, both in the Bible as in the metapsychological essays of Freud and his school, the first murder of humanity is identified with the founding time of civilization. Moreover, the innumerable glosses that the tale of fratricide has aroused and still arouses has not exhausted its disconcerting power, nor has it scratched its modernity: whether it is individuals, groups or peoples, every time man sets out to annihilate his fellow man, the representation of the original fratricide immediately re-emerges and Cain is called to answer for his crime before the divine tribunal, as in the Bible, or, in absentia, that of the community of men and of moral conscience.