“The theme that I found with IPSO [International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization] was that there was a common theme [in psychoanalytic training].  There was an initial phase full of terror and excitement, and then a middle phase of maybe some lethargy or apathy or disillusionment. In that middle phase, many candidates found IPSO, or IPSO found them,…

“When we reconstruct [in a patient] a possible lacking object or role or function, we  see that if the analyst himself has been able and the patient allowing him to be able to enter to a deep level the objective reality of the internal world of the patient, it can happen that some new function…

“The original papers that were written about the analyst’s unconscious being attuned to the patient’s unconscious by Hyman and Racker, in both cases they talk about this phenomenon. But both of them utter a caution, which is that one always has to take into account one’s own ‘mishegas’.  Essentially, what they’re saying is, the unconscious…

“The idea of analytic neutrality, which was more or less a cliche truth when I was training back in the 1980s, is clearly getting at something very important, which is that we mustn’t try to pre-conceive where the patient’s development is going to take him or her. But that doesn’t mean that the development is…

“There are very specific fears that people have that are specifically related to their own childhood, and I’d like to give an example. A mom with twins had a kidnapping fear. She was afraid every time she saw a car drive by her house that her twins would be kidnapped. Now this mother was herself…

“The amount of guilt and the sense of alienation that people feel when they fall in love with someone who is ‘outside’, and the struggle that they have to undergo to explain that choice which they fully don’t understand themselves, is a very deep conflict that my work tries to capture.The title of my book…

“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 see the importance being in the process of working with someone to write a case report such that the case report asks the reader to open up and deepen their awareness, both of the analysis, but by definition, also of themself. One is always asked, What does this mean? Go deeper, be more open….

“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…