ABSTRACT
To declare my interest, I want to encourage a practice of psychoanalytic reading of the Bible integrated into a genuinely critical approach, as opposed to a pseudo-criticism that doesn’t criticize anything (Bal 1991: chap. 3). This implies, first of all, that psychoanalytic method be kept in a tense relation of mutual critique with the other methods, not automatically submitted to another law than its own, as when some dominant method admits it, but only as subsidiary or secondary, forgetting that psychoanalysis has its own thing to say about submission to the law.1 (Psychoanalytic method is here exemplary of a range of “new” methods, literary, etc., about which I would say the same thing. I stress that I am not advocating rejection of historicalcritical methods, but rather a critical view of how methods interact with each other.) Second, this implies a psychocritique which, in line with current theory, does not exclude the critic from the criticism, living up to Jürgen Habermas’s characterization of psychoanalysis as “the only tangible example of a science systematically incorporating self-reflection” (Habermas 1971:214, and cf. the whole chapter; see also Bal 1991:35-36). This means coming to terms, in interpretive work, with the reality of transferential and countertransferential relationships at all levels.2 The results of interpretation are at no point separate from the unconscious reasons why I am doing it-though the interpretation always pretends to such separation, to objectivity (as biblical studies amply confirm). I find a superb model in Jane Gallop’s Reading Lacan (Gallop 1985), which never loses touch with what is going on between Lacan and Freud (whom to interpret was Lacan’s life’s work), or with what is going on between herself and Lacan.
