“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…

“I think it is very interesting to open a debate and talk about this impact of the culture, this epoch, in the subjectivity and never losing the internal work within psychoanalysis, within our consulting room. So when I  quote the Lacanian way of saying the ‘declination of the father’s name’, I am talking about these…

“I was very interested in the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the patient because I think one of the things about free association is that in the beginning most of what’s going on with the patient is unsaid.  As the analysis evolves more and more of the unspoken becomes spoken and more of it becomes…

“There was a lot of dilemma, and I wasn’t able to definitely deal with the sudden knowledge of my cancer and to be able to impart that information in a more containing and structured manner so that my patients can be held even in that situation. But the consciousness was there about how to go…

“In my own two analyses, I had observed such transformations for me in a very impressive way. I started my own analysis after the traumatic death of my sister when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had a breakdown, and I suffered from severe depressive and psychosomatic symptoms and sleep disorders but…