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But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever-changing forms.
Two distincts, division none.
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
My “intellectual autobiography” can be imagined as two sets of three overlapping circles. The first set of circles consists of activities: teaching, academic administration, and writing. The second set consists of three intellectual preoccupations: psychoanalysis, literature, especially Shakespeare, and the Holocaust. Each set is implicated in the other, and all six circles are in motion, their interplay and interaction varying from time to time and place to place, more like Ptolemy than Copernicus.
This abstract scheme is my guide to memory. I hope that the meanings of the circles will become clearer as I tell my story.
In 1942, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I was born into a working-class Sephardic Jewish family. I have a visceral memory of the resounding percussions of the 16” battleship guns practicing in New York harbor during the Second World War. Less than two years later, my father, a skilled carpenter and welder during the Depression, enlisted in the Navy. He was trained as a pharmacist's mate, spending 1944-1945 on