You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The thing is, sometimes you just can't know what to expect, and to be taken by surprise can either be an exhilarating or a profoundly unnerving experience. More than any other kind of surprise, to discover an unexpected part of oneself can be personally transformative or painfully shaming-the sweet pleasure of peekaboo or the fright of public exposure. When it comes to listening analytically and relationally to our patients, we have been alerted by exquisitely attuned listeners like Bromberg (2006) and Stern (2004) to the crucial importance of noticing the unanticipated and even generating environments in which both patient and analyst can feel safe, but not too safe, and be ready, but not too ready, to experience the unexpected. From time to time, the analyst can even find himself in a “relational double take,” where there is a dramatic surprise at what is noticed in the other and in oneself.
But is it possible to extend such alertness to other arenas of interpersonal experience? I would like to suggest that this same phenomenon of relational surprise, in both its exhilarating and unnerving forms, can also be found in reading texts, and that an examination of this perspective across both arenas can yield important reciprocal insights. In particular, I suggest that the experience of reading, and “listening,” to biblical texts is an interpersonal one, and that a reader of written biblical texts reads and listens as if the text can “speak” and be responsive in different ways at different times.
This is counterintuitive. After all, under what circumstances is biblical text typically presented? I, as so many other Jewish readers of biblical text, have sat in synagogue week after week, year after year, reading and re-reading the same stories, at precisely the same time of year each time. Such repetition and predictability can discourage a relationship to the text that feels fresh and alive. But I am suggesting that listening relationally to texts and patients involves open