God, Biblical Stories, and Psychoanalytic Understanding

In every process of reading there is interaction between text and reader. Religious texts speak about God; readers of religious texts have their images of God. Thus, in the process of reading religious texts we have a triangle with text, reader and God at the extreme points. But how are these points connected? The articles in the book discuss this question. They focus on biblical texts, and they make use of different psychoanalytic approaches. The book deals with the biblical subjects of the bloody bridegroom in Ex 4, the Oedipus complex in the book of Esther, the Saul-David story from a Kleinian perspective, and the creation of woman. This work also examines the question of interiorization and the images of God. The contributors are scholars from several European countries and from widely differing scholarly and denominational backgrounds, who discussed their papers in the course of a European SOCRATES intensive program.