ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytically informed studies of martyrdom are few in number. Stein states her approach succinctly: "Informed, intuitive-imaginative synthesizing of various and contradictory sites of knowledge, supported by psychoanalytic theory, enables us to project ourselves into the minds that dwell behind the written, televised, or otherwise mediated expression". Taking a different tack in her psychoanalytic study of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt specifically states that she does not "offer an analysis of a figure such as Robespierre in Freudian terms". An incommensurability exists between historical and psychoanalytic modes of investigation. The tension between thinking by means of historical time and psychoanalytic time might deter us from seeing the story as only a factual account or only a fantasy that has no connection to its historical setting. Religious stories may be better objects for psychoanalytic scrutiny than the often more idiosyncratic psyches of specific individuals. Working from the model of the family romance is not the usual way Second Maccabees is studied.
