Harvey Schwartz

Episode 140: Are Patients Different Today? with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)

“One of the changes that analysis provided me with was an awareness about how similar we all are, of course with a few differences. For me, an analyst is before all a person who had the opportunity to realize how we all human beings are very similar. We can familiarize with ourselves and with others…

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Episode 139: From Technology to Psychoanalysis with Nicolle Zapien, PhD (Oakland)

“Technology is based on the premise that there can be an optimization of things through algorithmic understanding. ‘Ones and zeros’ data can be manipulated and thus produce an optimal outcome which is a lovely idea for certain kinds of things. It’s not necessarily, in my opinion, the best idea for the psyche or for happiness…

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Episode 138: High-Conflict Divorce: Psychoanalytic Perspectives with Arthur Leonoff, Ph.D. (Ottawa)

“In divorce it’s fundamental that even though the couple ends, there’s not an end to the family. We still owe a debt to the other – that other who offered to love us, who we had the opportunity to love, our debt to the children of that union. We are irrevocably called to ethics and…

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Episode 137: The Role of Defense Analysis in Child (and Adult) Treatment with Leon Hoffman, MD (New York)

“The basic principle in defense analysis is that one approaches what is going on right now –  it’s an experience-near technique. You don’t make conjectures about what would be called experience-distant phenomenon until you have a lot of material, a lot of knowledge about the patient. As the treatment goes on you really stick with…

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Episode 135: Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.)

“Analytic candidates in training struggle with the fact that you tend to get thrown into the deep water before you really know what you’re doing. Then, the anxious candidate will typically struggle to find something to hang on to – and it’s much easier to hang on to a theory than it is to hang…

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Episode 133: International Commentaries on the State of our Field with Fred Busch, Ph.D. (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)

“I’ve long had concerns about the practice of psychoanalysis and that the theory underlying it has become a veritable Tower of Babel. We have these multiple views where everything is accepted as ‘psychoanalysis,’ but they really can’t be because they’re very different models and they call for very different things. I also feel that our…

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Episode 132: ‘Children Exposed to Pornography: the Erosion of Latency with Franco D’Alberton, Ph.D. & Andrea Scardovi, MD, Ph.D. (Bologna)

“They interviewed more than 6,000 American parents and their children from ages eight to thirteen. They wanted to identify what the perception and realities were of the parents’ use of technology. It is important to know that about one-third of the children said that their parents spent equal or less time with them than in…

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Episode 131: ‘Music Sounds the Way Emotion Feels’: from the Piano to the Couch with Julie Nagel, PhD (Dexter, Michigan)

 “Some of the shared concepts – even words that psychoanalysis and musicians use – such as conflict, ambiguity, silences, dissonance, resolution or not, working through, is in the Mozart you’ve heard. What you hear in the very opening four measures was worked through this entire sonata, it was thematic. If we play the whole sonata,…

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Episode 130: ‘Wearing the Attributes’ – 50 years as an Analyst with Judith Chused, MD (Washington, DC)

“A child [patient] makes a mistake, upsets things – one doesn’t console or complain, but just reflects whatever the patient’s affect was at that moment, such as, ‘that seems to bother you’ or ‘it’s hard to put those two pieces together’- to just observe it, to not have an affective response of disgust or irritation….

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Episode 129: From Immunology to Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Primitive Mental States with Shiri Ben Bassat (Tel Aviv)

“This is the first time that I really felt what is meant by cell relations. You have object relations and you have part-object relations and anxieties that are depressive and schizophrenic. But when I deal with primitive anxieties, I really felt cell relations. What I felt is that my cells were going beyond my skin…

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