THE WAGER OF FAITH IN FICTION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: READING COLM TOIBIN'S THE TESTAMENT OF MARY

摘要

Colm Toibin 's novella The Testament of Mary (2013) offers a provocative re-imagining of the Virgin Mary's life 20 years after the crucifixion of her son Jesus. Drawing on Richard Kearney's notion of anatheism or a 'return to God after God', I use the fictive space opened up in Toibin's version of the Gospel as a spur to understanding the way in which faith may be conceived of as wager within both fiction and psychoanalysis. Discussing how the reception of the artistic message requires the same spirit of hospitality as does the encounter with alterity within the psychoanalytic relationship, I argue that in both cases we are faced with an existential moment of choice that requires a wholehearted willingness to engage with otherness. The implications of Toibin's story for psychoanalytic work are then explored with reference to developmental processes outlined by Winnicott (1971) in his paper 'The use of an object'. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the significance of testimony within psychoanalytic work.