“When you’re with a patient you take all that you know in your head, all the theory, and you throw it away. You have to listen to the patient and then maybe afterward something becomes clear – you use that ‘in-between’ as a way maybe in the next session. But if you were sitting there…

“I feel as a psychoanalyst one has to respond to the world. We can’t just simply remain in our consulting rooms although that has always been vitally important for my identity and thinking. We can’t turn a blind eye to what is going on in the world. There are a lot of awful things going…

“Unconsciously, or sometimes just without really focusing on it, we’re always responding to the musicality of the patient’s voice. I think that careful listening and study of opera really hones our ability to do that. We pay more attention to it and we can potentially make not just unconscious use of it but also conscious…

“The psychoanalytic frame I have built in myself helps me to find a way to not go too near and not be too distant to a person. It is other than what we learn when we learn to be psychoanalysts. Then we have the opportunity to feel in a room where we are not in…

“It seemed to me in my training, also in my scholarly pursuits, that desire did not have conceptual status in most analytic clinical theory. Most traditions did not have a way of talking about the analyst’s motivations with the exception of the well-worn ideas about the analyst’s ‘blind spots’. But in terms of specific motivations,…

“During the treatment they start to think about their family, they want to understand what really happened to their parents that made them such monsters towards their own children? They start to look for the origins of their family and the history of the family and they found transgenerational traumas from both sides – family…

“Aren’t these daughters of Persia retelling that myth [Shahnameh] as we speak – they put their hair down, Rudabeh put her hair down. This time maybe from this union there will now be a baby girl that will be born. This new epic female hero will transform this land. Something has happened – it’s an…

“I started with an analyst right as I was ending residency and starting the fellowship in Behavioral Neurology and Movement Disorders. It was right in this transition time, and over time it transitioned into a psychoanalysis, and I think it served a number of functions. There was something about the way of exploring what was…

“I feel very often that I can detect when people are doing case presentations, this ubiquitous tendency to not bother about the body. At a very superficial level it is accepted that we run around in bodies. What is actually a slightly deeper idea is that we run around in bodies, but our minds couldn’t…

 “I think that writing also is among the things that help me think this through and get there. When I finished my degree, I was actually very pessimistic – I had no idea that at close to age 55-56 that a psychoanalytic institute would even consider me but I did decide to take the leap…