My Way to Psychoanalysis

My love affair with Freud began when I was 12 years old. I found, in the library of a family friend, a book published in Hebrew as a part of a series of “Popular Science,” named Psychoanalysis and Its Creator Sigmund Freud. After I read it, I told my friends enthusiastically that now I know that our mind is divided onto three parts—an id, an ego, and a superego—and that we have many wishes and ideas that we are not conscious of. We used to have at that time, in the last year of elementary school, a weekly lesson to be prepared by one of the pupils according to his choice. I asked to get the topic of “The Psychology of Adolescence,” which I prepared according to some booklet of Anna Freud and other Freudian texts that I found in Hebrew, and was very proud when the teacher, who always used to criticize everyone, when finishing the lesson dryly uttered, “I have nothing to add.” When I was asked in those days what I would like to be as an adult, I used to answer that I still cannot decide if I want to be a musician or a psychoanalyst.

But these were the years prior to the founding of the state of Israel, when the aim of all of us, members of the Zionist youth movements, was to become farmers in our future free country. So I went for four years to an agricultural school, joined the army at the age of 17, and, after the independence war, found myself together with all my friends from the army establishing a new kibbutz, called Erez (a name now famous for the gate to the Gaza Strip built near it). A year later, beginning to feel a little bored planting potatoes and milking cows ten hours a day, I decided to leave and go to the university, but owing to my guilt feelings about leaving the kibbutz, I felt that the only profession worthy of spending time studying in those critical years of founding the new state of Israel was agriculture, and I promised everyone that soon after finishing my studies I would come back to the kibbutz to serve as an agronomist.

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