Agnon’’s Story: A Psychoanalytic Biography of S. Y. Agnon

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, whom he left when she was very ill, and about whose death he felt guilty all his life, his emotionally-fragile wife, whom he named after his mother, and his adopted motherland, ＂the 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 unconscious emotional forces that drove his stories, his ambivalence about his family, and the underlying narcissistic grandiosity of his famous ＂modesty.＂

Avner Falk is an internationally-known scholar in psychohistory and political psychology. He studied clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1960-1966) and at Washington University in St. Louis (1966-1970). After returning to Israel in 1971 he worked for three decades as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Jerusalem. He has published ten scholarly books, including psychoanalytic studies of Jewish history, the Arab-Israeli conflict, antisemitism, Islamic terror and the Crusades, as well as psychoanalytic biographies of Moshe Dayan, David Ben-Gurion, Theodor Herzl, Napoleon Bonaparte and Barack Obama. His book Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict won an award from Choice magazine.