Agnon's Story

A Psychoanalytic Biography of S. Y. Agnon
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-90-04-36777-7
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 26, 766 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 1157 g

Reihe: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies

Agnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional objects of his life, in particular his “father-teacher," his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, whom he left when she was very ill, and about whose death he felt guilty all his life, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after his mother, and his adopted motherland, “the Land of Israel." Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to sublimate his emotional pain into works of art.
This biography seeks to investigate the unconscious emotional forces that drove his stories, his ambivalence about his family, and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”

Autoren/Hrsg.

Falk, Avner

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien: Literatur & Kunst
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Jüdische Identität & Biographien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Einzelne Autoren: Monographien & Biographien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Literatur des Nahen Ostens & Nordafrikas

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon

1 The Home Town as Mother

2 The Land of Israel as the Idealized Mother

3 The Adoptive German Motherland

4 The Wife as Mother

5 A Daughter Named Faith

6 Catastrophic Change and Traumatic Flight

7 The Nobel Prize as Mother’s Love

8 Escape to Germany

9 Back to the Dead Mother

10 The Turning Point: Agnon, Kafka and Freud

11 The Writer, His Wife, and Her Psychoanalyst

12 Agnon vs. Freud: Hostility and Fascination

13 The Middle-Aged Hebrew Writer

14 Nobel Ambitions and the Quest for Mother’s Love

15 A Heart Attack in Sweden

16 My Way of Life is Fallen into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf

17 Losses, Eulogies and Stories

18 The “Jewish Messiah” and the “King of Flesh and Blood”

Epilogue: After Life’s Fitful Fever

Figures

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Avner Falk is an internationally-known scholar in psychohistory and political psychology. He studied clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1960–1966) and at Washington University in St. Louis (1966–1970). After returning to Israel in 1971 he worked for three decades as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Jerusalem. He has published ten scholarly books, including psychoanalytic studies of Jewish history, the Arab-Israeli conflict, antisemitism, Islamic terror and the Crusades, as well as psychoanalytic biographies of Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, Napoleon Bonaparte and Barack Obama. His book Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict won an award from Choice magazine.