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To the Editor
In a recent article, Richard D. Chessick (1995) proposes a “psychobiography” of the mythological figure of Jesus. Chessick himself tells us that historical information about his subject is nonexistent, and that we cannot trust the “historically questionable evidence of the Gospels” (p. 30). Nevertheless, he then proceeds to give us a detailed biography of Jesus, together with numerous psychoanalytic speculations, and chooses to rely on modern religious tracts (including one by Albert Schweitzer) that are treated as “historical scholarship.”
A recent psychobiography of Abraham Lincoln (Burlingame, 1994) contains 1,728 footnotes in 408 pages, and with few speculations, which should leave psychoanalytic readers rather unsatisfied, but Chessick has decided go the opposite way. The result is a psychobiography with zero data. One obvious issue is cultural bias. The Jesus myth shares many features with the Hindu myth of Krishna. I doubt very much whether Chessick would be ready to treat the Krishna case as psychobiographical material.
It is unfortunate that Chessick has chosen to disregard psychoanalytic interpretations of mythology, of which at last count there were over a hundred (Beit-Hallahmi, 1995). Several of those deal specifically with the Jesus myth, some with much originality and brilliance (Dundes, 1981; Jones, 1951; Wayne, 1951). At the same time, one has to admit that there is also a parallel tradition in psychoanalysis, involving the uncritical use of mythology as biographical fact. Didn't Sigmund Freud himself speculate about the mythological figure of Moses? Since all we know about “Moses” or “Jesus” is pure myth, we should all be free to add to that, and speculate to our heart's content (decisively proving that “Moses” was a Croatian, a Martian, or a borderline personality), but that has nothing to do with the psychoanalytic psychology.