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Autobiographical Turns of the Freudian Scholar: Life Writing of Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman by Alana Sobelman

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Autobiographical Turns of the Freudian Scholar: Life Writing of Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman by Alana Sobelman Autobiographical Turns of the Freudian Scholar: Life Writing of Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY” by Alana Sobelman Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev 29 March 2015 Beer-Sheva Autobiographical Turns of the Freudian Scholar: Life Writing of Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY” by Alana Sobelman Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Approved by the advisor Approved by the Dean of the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies 29 March 2015 Beer-Sheva This work was carried out under the supervision of Mark H. Gelber. Department: Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics Faculty: Faculty of Humanities Research-Student's Affidavit when Submitting the Doctoral Thesis for Judgment I, Alana Sobelman, whose signature appears below, hereby declare that (Please mark the appropriate statements): _X__ I have written this Thesis by myself, except for the help and guidance offered by my Thesis Advisors. _X__ The scientific materials included in this Thesis are products of my own research, culled from the period during which I was a research student. ___ This Thesis incorporates research materials produced in cooperation with others, excluding the technical help commonly received during experimental work. Therefore, I am attaching another affidavit stating the contributions made by myself and the other participants in this research, which has been approved by them and submitted with their approval. Date: 29 March 2015 Student's name: Alana Sobelman Signature:____AS_____ Abstract This doctoral dissertation posits that autobiographical texts written by scholars share an unexpected space with a scholar’s theoretical works. By examining the multitude of concepts and arguments contained in a scholar’s autobiography in relation to the scholar's academic writings—some which parallel, others which modify a scholar’s academic texts—new possibilities for reading autobiography emerge. The central scholar- autobiographical and theoretical works addressed in this dissertation are those of German-American cultural historian Peter Gay and French philosopher Sarah Kofman. Important for the arguments presented in my dissertation is the fact that both scholars focus on the life and work of Sigmund Freud throughout much of their writings. The major autobiographical works of these two scholars are based on recollections of their early experiences before, during, and immediately following the Holocaust, which, when tied to their critical and biographical texts related to Freud and psychoanalysis, shed new theoretical light on their autobiographical works. My point of departure in this dissertation is an exploration of the subgenres of autobiographical works written by Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman and the relationship between these subgenres and the fields of expertise of each scholar. Following in-depth, intertextual analyses of concepts such as biography, Jewishness, and the unspeakability of the Holocaust in both the critical and autobiographical works of Gay and Kofman, their autobiographies become understood as critical texts. One argument I present through my reading of Sarah Kofman’s autobiography of the Holocaust, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), posits that, by inserting quotation marks and other Derridian “grafts” and marginal citations into autobiographical texts, Kofman effectively decontextualizes traumatic childhood events in ways that enable her (and in turn all autobiographers of traumatic experiences) to gain relief from “choking on the words,” as Kofman puts it, to describe traumatic experience, thus appeasing the “double bind” of Holocaust testimony. In a separate example, I apply Kofman’s literary-critical readings of Sigmund Freud’s work, specifically his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” and his essay on “Repression” back on to her autobiographical works Smothered Words (1985) and Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), and illustrate that the fact of the impossibility of utterance following a traumatic event contains no communicable origin, as the events to which such potential utterances would refer have already found their expression through fantasy and psychic manipulation, and thus cannot be recovered in a form which is fully representative of the original traumatic experience. Kofman asserts that the original experience is “always already” lost in its occurrence, as lived experience can be approached only through inherently disconnected memories. Rereading Rue Ordener, Rue Labat and Smothered Words through these Kofmanian constructs promotes a new understanding of the multitude of ways in which Kofman’s works communicate, cooperate, and often quarrel with one another. In another example of intertextual scholar-autobiographical interpretation presented in this dissertation, I introduce a model of interpretation which employs Kofman’s reading of the “cap scene” in Freud’s 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams (a well-known passage in which Freud recollects his father’s narrative of witnessing his own father—Freud’s grandfather—having his cap thrown off his head by a Christian during a Saturday walk) in her The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings (1985) to argue that Gay, as a Freud biographer and Freudian autobiographer, is caught up in an oedipal conflict that paradoxically disables the possibility of constructing an accurate autobiographical account. Utilizing Kofman, I show that, through Gay’s displacement of his autobiographical father in My German Question with Freud’s father depicted in Gay’s biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), Gay illustrates his identification with Freud to the point of complete self-substitution. Gay’s autobiographical and scholarly writings therefore emerge as effective examples for Sarah Kofman’s assertion that Freud’s father-son formula has no stable source or resolution, even when expressed through a highly constructed text, such as Gay’s My German Question. This dissertation proposes that Sarah Kofman’s and Peter Gay’s autobiographical formulations—from small textual fragments to whole texts—operate in a dialogue with the critical assertions found in their theoretical texts. The arguments presented in this dissertation ultimately respond to a lack of scholarship focusing on the highly critical elements found in scholar-autobiographies and directly challenge the notion that because autobiography fails in its attempt to fully and accurately depict a lived life, it has little or no theoretical significance for scholarship. Keywords: Scholar Autobiography, Holocaust Autobiography, Peter Gay, Sarah Kofman Sobelman 1 This dissertation could not have been completed without the encouragement, constructive criticism, and general life advice of Professor Mark H. Gelber. Sobelman 2 Table of Contents Abstract (English) Introduction Scholar Autobiography: Characteristics and Complications 3 Chapter One Peter Gay: Freud Scholar, Freudian Autobiographer 26 Chapter Two Sarah Kofman: Elusive Freudian Autobiographer 57 Chapter Three Freudian Convergences: Kofman Reading Gay 116 Conclusion Pushing the Limits of Scholar Autobiography 166 Bibliography 178 Sobelman 3 Introduction Scholar Autobiography: Characteristics and Complications And here I may be allowed to break off these autobiographical notes. The public has no claim to learn any more of my personal affairs—of my struggles, my disappointments, and my successes. I have in any case been more open and frank in some of my writings (such as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life) than people usually are who describe their lives for their contemporaries or for posterity. I have had small thanks for it, and from my experience I cannot recommend anyone to follow my example. (Sigmund Freud, Postscript to An Autobiographical Study, 73) The following dissertation posits that autobiographical texts written by scholars share an unexpected space with a scholar’s theoretical works. By examining the multitude of concepts and arguments contained in a scholar’s autobiography in relation to the scholar's academic writings—some which parallel, others which modify a scholar’s academic texts—new possibilities for reading autobiography emerge. The scholar- autobiographical and theoretical works addressed here are those of German-American cultural historian Peter Gay and French philosopher Sarah Kofman. Important for the arguments presented in this dissertation is the fact that both scholars address the life and work of Sigmund Freud throughout much of their writings. The major autobiographical works of these two scholars are based on recollections of their early experiences before, during, and immediately following the Holocaust, which, when tied to their critical and biographical texts related to Freud and psychoanalysis, shed new theoretical light on their autobiographical works. The point of departure in this dissertation is an exploration of the subgenres of autobiographical works written by Peter Gay and Sarah Kofman and the relationship between these subgenres and the fields of expertise of each scholar. Following in-depth, intertextual analyses of concepts such as biography, Jewishness, and Sobelman 4 the unspeakability of the Holocaust in both the critical and autobiographical works of Gay and Kofman, their Holocaust autobiographies become understood as critical texts. Over the last decade,
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