My Life and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis has coursed through my entire life, pervading my personal and sexual experiences, my family life, my work as a historian, my politics, my innermost questioning of self. Its salience did not arise out of questions concerning neurotic symptoms, treatment, or cure. Rather, I was drawn to psychoanalysis because it seemed to me to offer a superior way of living: deeper, more conscious and more intellectual. At the same time, I had a quasi-catastrophic experience in the course of a ten-year intensive psychoanalysis. I will try to tell this story, as I have tried to live my life, so that particular intense moments, like my experience in analysis, are given due weight but no more than that, and so that the overall picture of my relation to analysis is captured, for in my case it has been an overwhelmingly happy one.

I have often felt almost superstitiously close to Sigmund Freud, and to the people immediately around him, in part because I was born more or less when Freud died—at the outbreak of the Second World War—and in what I imagined to be a similar environment. My parents were Jewish refugees, and we shared a hyper-intense world of inner familial involvement, compared to which the outside world seemed cold and alien. For many years I traced my difficulties in life to my belief that my father had been traumatized by his experience as a refugee from the Russian Revolution. He was around nine or ten when the family fled, his father became incurably ill, and it took a decade for the family to reach America. As a result, my father grew up in refugee camps, where he learned his first trade, as a barber. My father once told me that his greatest professional accomplishment was becoming a beautician, styling women's hair, as opposed to cutting men's. He was a very handsome man, with a somewhat “feminine” side. He loved to give pleasure, and he cared more for the wellbeing of others than he did for himself.