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Every so often a book comes along that brings in psychoanalytic concepts that contain a startling vision. This is a book that can eschew worn out psychoanalytic catechisms. Texts that we have long been familiar with suddenly take on a new meaning. Protagonists in stories become more understandable. The majestic figures in the great books from ancient Greece to the present are redeveloped into human size. Such a book is one edited by Peter Rudnytsky and Ellen Handler Spitz. The editors are not clinical psychoanalysts yet they are analytically trained. They come to psychoanalysis from the Humanities, and they have invited a group of scholars from biblical studies, history, philosophy, the classics, and psychoanlysis, who penetrate the texts so delightfully that we are taken away from the usual procrustean bed of theorizing.
What is forbidden remains unseen, invisible. Yet there are clues in the language of a story. Thus in Professor Yael F. Feldman's chapter, “And Rebecca Loved Jacob: But Freud did not,” the unspoken reality in the family system of the ancient Hebrew patriarch, Isaac, is discussed in terms of the father, sibling, and mother-son attachments. The author searches the Hebrew text for meaning, and finds subtleties in the language that suggest that gender issues were present