Agnon's story : : a psychoanalytic biography of S.Y. Agnon / / by Avner Falk.

• VerfasserIn: Falk, Avner,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill-Rodopi,, 2018.
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 26.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (773 pages).

Agnon’s Story is the first complete psychoanalytic biography of the Nobel-Prize-winning Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon. It investigates the hidden links between his stories and his biography. Agnon was deeply ambivalent about the most important emotional “objects” of his life, in particular his “father-teacher,” his ailing, depressive and symbiotic mother, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after her and his adopted “home-land” of Israel. Yet he maintained an incredible emotional resiliency and ability to “sublimate” his emotional pain into works of art. This biography seeks to investigate the emotional character of his literary canon, his ambivalence to his family and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous “modesty.”

Table of Contents

Front Matter -- Copyright -- Acknowledgements -- Figures -- Introduction: The Mind of S.Y. Agnon -- The Home Town as Mother -- The Land of Israel as the Idealized Mother -- The Adoptive German Motherland -- The Wife as Mother -- A Daughter Named Faith -- Catastrophic Change and Traumatic Flight -- The Nobel Prize as Mother’s Love -- Escape to Germany -- Back to the Dead Mother -- The Turning Point: Agnon, Kafka, and Freud -- The Writer, His Wife, and Her Psychoanalyst -- Agnon vs. Freud: Hostility and Fascination -- The Middle-Aged Hebrew Writer -- Nobel Ambitions and the Quest for Mother’s Love -- A Heart Attack in Sweden -- My Way of Life is Fallen into the Sere, the Yellow Leaf -- Losses, Eulogies, and Stories -- The “Jewish Messiah” and the “King of Flesh and Blood” -- Epilogue: After Life’s Fitful Fever -- Back Matter -- Bibliography.