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Often when I meet people socially for the first time, I'll be asked, “How did you come to have two professions?” Well—as this audience can well imagine—it's a long story. Usually I mumble something about narrative and fascination and try to shift the attention back to them. Today's occasion offers a chance to reflect about my two professions, literary studies and psychoanalysis, what drew me to them, and how they overlap and integrate. One emotional truth governs for me. They are sources of pleasure: more exactly, intellectual, moral, at times sober and dreadful, at others humorous, playful, anxious, or conflicted, often complex pleasures—in short, sublimatory pleasures. Both professions are alike in that. They allow me ranging joys of thought in the work I do, even when the work itself may involve distress.
For a long time, my path to them was more serendipitous than chosen. The youngest in a lively, affable, verbal family; an identified Jew emerging to consciousness during World War II, the discovery of the camps, and the struggle to protect the fledgling State of Israel, all the while safely ensconced in America, where Jews were a minority but hardly threatened; and an adolescent tacking through average-expectable adventures and turmoils at a huge public high school in Brooklyn after intense grade school years in a small Zionist yeshivah—I had a lot to fathom, a lot to be puzzled and curious about. When I was a child, I asked so many questions my father would call me Pinocchio. I was that nosy. And nosiness (since the ego is first of all a body ego) is a good word for it, the spark that energizes my fascination, my continuing pleasure, in figuring out what's going on and whether I have a sufficient take on it.
In college it took only brief exposure to Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, Wordsworth's poetry, and introductory physics to convince me