“When we reconstruct [in a patient] a possible lacking object or role or function, we  see that if the analyst himself has been able and the patient allowing him to be able to enter to a deep level the objective reality of the internal world of the patient, it can happen that some new function…

“The idea of analytic neutrality, which was more or less a cliche truth when I was training back in the 1980s, is clearly getting at something very important, which is that we mustn’t try to pre-conceive where the patient’s development is going to take him or her. But that doesn’t mean that the development is…

“There are very specific fears that people have that are specifically related to their own childhood, and I’d like to give an example. A mom with twins had a kidnapping fear. She was afraid every time she saw a car drive by her house that her twins would be kidnapped. Now this mother was herself…

“The amount of guilt and the sense of alienation that people feel when they fall in love with someone who is ‘outside’, and the struggle that they have to undergo to explain that choice which they fully don’t understand themselves, is a very deep conflict that my work tries to capture.The title of my book…

“I belong to the race that in the Middle Ages was blamed for all the plagues and such experiences have a sobering effect, and they do not arouse the tendency to believe in illusions. Much of my life has been devoted to trying to shed illusions. But if there is an illusion worth believing in,…

“I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It’s been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year….

“What Freud may have missed here is that the investment in the lost object is a much more reconstructive and integrative process. It’s one where we remember all the stories that we have heard from the lost object – the repetitive stories about the childhood of the person or how they met significant others and…

“A number of art schools in the early 60s said: “Clearly, it is the relationship of the painter to the medium that is the essence of painting – the painter must be emotionally present, and this is what we should instill in our students.” So they started to take away traditional training in art schools…

“The Holocaust seems to me to be the paradigmatic case of the acting out of unconscious fears, fantasies and projections onto another group that has ever occurred. It is the place therefore for psychoanalytic concepts in understanding anti-Semitism and racism more generally. Particularly in this context and thinking about Nazism and Nazi perpetrators is crucial,…

“The historian [of the vineyard] gave us regular feedback on what she was finding, and she also brought in oral historians to take our own life histories. There’s also a psychoanalytical point to be made here – you can take refuge in this scholarly exercise, going into archives and finding out things that happened hundreds…