“She [his mother] felt that his kicking was deliberate evil and she responded with wishes for an abortion. She also stopped breastfeeding because she felt that the sucking was so strong and aggressive that it was destroying her. Without the father as a triangulating object he had no one to contain this – every child…

“In such moments [of shared danger] you work with the present and not the representation. In analysis we work all the time with representation – the transference is a representation, the countertransference is a representation. They are related to our past when such things happened. At these moments it’s not important if the patient goes…

“A big part of my graduate education at Harvard was critical thinking. The general idea that theories come and go, even the data come and go because it’s modified as new experimental paradigms that develop. So the idea of fixity. that “now we now know and it’s set in stone”, was not at all in…

“In the group that I co-chair on the Aging Analyst we’ve talked a lot about what difference it makes having practiced a long time. One of the ideas that emerged is not only that this varies from person to person, but that there is a lot more freedom to use some different approaches, less rigid,…

“I started to notice that the very things that I was seeing in patients on the couch were occurring at a much greater macro level in society – the issues of disavowal, of exceptionalism, of abandoning reality if it means that you have to give something up. That is why I got so interested in…

“It’s very exhilarating to have shared an in-depth experience with another person the way you do as an analyst. You know the inner workings of people’s struggles, of their strengths, and of the things they overcome. We’re granted such a privilege to be part of someone’s’ world and to be able to help them get…

“The workbook contextualizes the child in his or her network. The idea being that the more the child has a supportive network and that they can use this network, the more they will be able to face the aspects of COVID-19. So it’s not only the illness and having people in the family who are…

“What kind of home [institute] have you got to live in? If you design a home, not as a refuge but where there is a place to be able to think, it’s a slightly different concept. I’m not going to hide you in this secondary container, but I am going to help you to think…

“We, as analysts, really need to use our psychoanalytic understanding of the value of the inner life of every individual and of the value of growth and development that occurs in a relationship. We need to use that kind of knowledge to find alternative ways, other than the intensive treatment we offer in our offices,…

“Persecutory guilt is simply a form of self-attack, it is tormenting and it belongs to the paranoid schizoid position and it is narcissistic. People sometimes don’t fully recognize the narcissism in the paranoid-schizoid position, because it is in that position you are feeling hunted by predators… When we’re in the depressive/reparative position other people are…