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Interpretation, both literary and psychoanalytic, has traditionally been associated with a quest-romance of discovery, especially self-discovery or the purchase of self-knowledge. In keeping with such an interpretive tradition, this collection of essays, centering on the theme of knowledge in Western literature, surveys a wide-ranging number of texts and authors from the Bible to James Joyce. The nine contributors represent different methodologies and styles of
psychoanalytic criticism and as such, as with all good examples of such applied interpretation, their essays offer insights into both literature and psychoanalysis as much as into their theoretical intersection.
Yael S. Feldman begins the collection with a study of the structural and dynamic differences between biblical families and Freudian families, the latter being characterized by “‘vertical,’ intergenerational conflict” (p. 10) between fathers and sons, and the former by “horizontal” conflict between brothers. Even in Genesis, with its emphasis on “patriarchal stories” (p. 11), the real focus, Feldman argues, is “on intragenerational sibling rivalry rather than on filial rebellion” (p. 11). Thus “the primal scene (and sin) of Genesis” (p. 13) for Feldman is not patricide by the horde, but fratricide (Cain's murder of Abel). Readers familiar with Milton's Paradise Lost may wonder at this transformation of “Man's first Disobedience” from filial transgression (Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit) into sibling offense, but they should perhaps consider that “first” is not necessarily “primal,” even though Milton would have seen fratricide as one of the foul effects of the Fall. What Feldman offers is a model of biblical psychology that “frees the family structure not only from rigid generational strife as postulated by Freud, but also from the no less rigid gender roles imposed on it by the oedipal masterplot and its insistence on essentialist sexual difference” (p. 17).
Ellen Handler Spitz surveys Freud's int