Marie Balmary, born about 1939, is a French psychoanalyst and essayist . In addition to her therapeutic practice, she studies the Bible and Greek mythology with groups of scholars using psychoanalytic theory and, in return, questioning its foundations.
Balmary is a clinical psychologist with university training, a psychoanalyst with Lacanian training and a researcher.[1]
Her doctoral thesis devoted to the relationship between Freudian theory and Freud 's family history having been refused before defense; she published it in 1979 under the title L'Homme aux statues: Freud et la faute cachée du père, or The Man with Statues: Freud and the hidden fault of the father . In this work, she revisits Freudian theory based on a reading of the myth of Oedipus, which includes the story of Oedipus' father and the etymological consideration of the words and names of these stories and a study of their relationship with the history of Freud's family.[2]
After the publication of her thesis, Balmary began reading the Bible. When she approached the Biblical origin myth, which she considered to be the book of Genesis, she followed the Biblical reading seminar of the Jesuit exegete Paul Beauchamp[3] for three years in the early 1980s, and became close from him.
In her reading, she mobilized psychoanalytic concepts to understand and interpret the founding biblical texts.[4] She paids very close attention to the letter of these texts, in their original languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and biblical Greek, which she learned,[1] and considered any apparent strangeness or "mistakes" of the text, including grammatical errors, as being able to carry meaning.
Her close reading led to new understandings and re-interpretations.
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