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Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate …
Readers of American Imago may have encountered Claire Kahane's essay (2020) about Ian McEwan's A Child in Time , which won the Silberger Prize from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. Interdisciplinary scholars familiar with the history of psychoanalytic feminist writings will know of ground-breaking anthologies she contributed to and co-edited, The (M) other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1985) and In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (1985). Academic colleagues of her generation may have read her Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915 (1995). We may remember the landmark conference, “The Creative Use of Difference,” that she organized as a faculty member at the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at SUNY at Buffalo in 1980. These achievements define an exemplary professional life but tell us little about the personal experience of their author and the currents of history that shaped her interests and interpretive choices.
Now, in her memoir, Nine Lives, an extraordinarily candid and finely written book, she presents herself in another key, from her beginnings, before she changed her name from Clara Katz to Claire Kahane in 1974, when she became a literary professor during the eighth of her “nine lives.” Like a feminine Othello, Claire Kahane recalls exotic adventures—courageous, dangerous carefree and careless—through which she rises above and away from her origins and gradually comes to know herself in the performative self-fashioning of “a wayward woman addicted to the pleasures of marginality” (p. 3) Her travels by hitch-hiking and by motorcycle, scooter, car, boat and plane take her from the Bronx through the USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and North Africa, Israel and China. Seeking “a depth
of experiential knowledge“ (p. 78), she is immersed in the cultural turmoil and rebellious freedom of the 1950s and 60s sub