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Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories to live,” and when reading Szajnberg's Psychic Mimesis From Bible and Homer to Now, it's clear how central stories are to the human condition. Szajnberg's contribution is inspired by Erich Auerbach's Mimesis , which seeks a unifying theory of representation across Western literature spanning ancient Greece and Rome to the modernist writers of the 20th century.
Szajnberg revives this tradition in his work and keeps to a similar structure, starting like Auerbach did, contrasting the father–son dyad of Odysseus/Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey to that of Abraham/ Isaac in the Akedah as told in Genesis 22. He notes that while both are father–son stories, the contrasts include the Homeric tale of a circular hero's journey written in an elevated language and foregrounded nature in which there is externalized narration with little that is left uninterrupted, whereas in the biblical style, the journey, especially when placed within the wider frame of patriarchal tales, is progressive,
with a sparser language that tends to emphasize the background, often discussed abruptly with sparse parts, particularly the emotional, in high relief, while much is left unexpressed and thus pulls on interpretation by the reader. Following this discussion, he deviates from Auerbach, making the astute point that in these two tales, one is the story of a father and son reuniting, and the other is of a father nearly murdering his son. Szajnberg adds a third story to the pair selected by Auerbach—a biblical tale of two patriarchs reuniting, the story of Jacob and reuniting with his“‘lost” son Joseph in Genesis 46. This then leads to Szajnberg's ideas about how the early biblical stories could be read as reflections of psychic structural elements of id, superego, and ego ideal. This first chapter marks what makes this contribution unique: Auerbach is revived, but with a distinct psychoanalytic lens, with some modifications along the way in terms of tome