“I believe that to be inspiring, we have to have conviction. Conviction is the central thing to me. Conviction about treatment itself, and conviction about the way that we do treatment. I saw two analysts at two different times of my life, and they were very different. They had very different theoretical backgrounds, but one…

“In analytic training, and actually through my own analysis, is really where it happened. I think I just got more of a sense that whatever was going on with my students and the parents of my students was maybe not about me. It might not be all up to me, and something about that really…

“We have a trove of treasure. These are the case studies, and we need the case studies – these are the flora and fauna of our field. This is how we work. We work by reading case studies and they enrich us. Not only do they enrich the community, but they also enrich us as…

“I have always been fascinated by the world of animals. What fascinated me about them is that when you pay attention to animals, this is a world beyond words. Words are not part of their world, so you start paying attention to movement, to breath, to reaction, to the pause, all these things, and I…

“As analysts we have our own development – as humans we have our own development. My view is that the work of analysis, if the developmental piece is present, requires some relatively sophisticated developmental capacity on the part of the analyst. The work is intimate and the patient is going to know something of our…

“All my writing before this has been poetry, and over the years in my books of poems I found the lines kept getting longer. I think the move towards prose had me working on this journal form, which I’ve not done. Many people write their journals their entire lives. For me, it’s a more dipping…

“A saturated state is a state in which the conceptual or emotional object has absolute value, it is already stacked or closed to new meanings and therefore cannot undergo any kind of transformation. An unsaturated state, on the other hand, is a state in which the emotional or conceptual object is in an open state…

“This patient taught me a lot. The context was that I just finished my second training as a psychodynamic psychotherapist and I felt I needed to prove a lot, and I clearly arrived with the wrong agenda. It was that if I was good enough and smart enough, a clever enough just graduated psychodynamic psychotherapist,…

“We bring our patterns with us wherever we go, into every relationship, and we necessarily and inevitably bring them into the therapy relationship or the psychoanalytic relationship, because that’s a relationship too. It’s not a matter of choice. It simply happens. It happens everywhere. The therapist doesn’t do anything to make it happen. This is…

“The similarity between Freud and Kohelet [Ecclesiastes] is that both of them believe that there’s no overarching totalistic system that  integrates all the disparate experiences that one has. You have that, Freud says, in psychotics, and you have that in philosophers, and you have that in devout people –  they look for systematicity. They try…