“During the whole course of your [psychoanalytic] training, you are laying on the couch and have your personal analysis and beforehand you don’t know where it will lead you. You start to discover corners of your unconscious psyche which you don’t want, which you are not so eager to explore. This accompanies you during the…

“I would love for the psychoanalytic world to re-embrace some of these adjunctive treatments that get to non-ordinary states of consciousness in order to enhance psychoanalytic treatment, and that includes psychedelics. The other thing I’d like to see is, I think psychoanalysts are extremely well suited to use psychedelic-assisted therapy in a non-harmful way. I…

“What is it like to be a clinician with a patient who either comes because they’re going to be dying or it happens in the treatment –  what is it like for the clinician? It’s lonely in a way because there is a lot of parallel with what the patient is going through. To me,…

“From such accounts [of Polish atrocities] we can see how incredibly emotional and how incredibly pleasurable it could be on the social level, not only for the people involved, but for the whole group, and we can really see how violence on others becomes the core of social identity, of the national identity. We tend…

“Freud obviously is very brave and courageous to accept that the world is inadequate and that my desires will never be sufficiently fulfilled. My question – is this in fact the case? I think that everyone has had some kind of spiritual experience, some more than others and in many different contexts, not just religious…

“Psychoanalysis landed in Finland in the 50s; before the Second World War there was one or two persons familiar with psychoanalysis. In the 50s, psychoanalysis got a lot of interest in Finland but then there was no possibility of training in Finland. The pioneers went abroad, some to Sweden and some to Switzerland. They picked…

“My interest is to rather than continue with the psychoanalytic tilt which has tended to try to find the words – to find the areas of the analyst that has words to engage with these states and then help the patient transform these states into something thinkable and communicable. [In contrast] my interest has been…

 “The first line treatment for adolescents with anorexia now is family-based therapy which involves helping the parents facilitate the refeeding of the adolescent. I was working with patients in that way and found it to be helpful and useful but was consistently struck by the neglect of the patient’s inner life. Based on my experience…

“The ability to play means we can indulge in a kind of illusion, not delusion, and make a distinction. It always amazes me that when the patient arrives, they like the routine of an analysis; nobody breaks that, it’s an illusion; it is a piece of theater every time. We open the door to our…

“I was speaking to the tendency of the popular media to perceive narratives of Indian women’s sexuality via the lens of oppression. Now, of course, sexual violence against women is an important concern in India, as it is worldwide. But telling the story of violence against women misses the story of how women desire, which…