“The gift of the [traditional] healer that he shares with those of us who do psychoanalytic work is that we are given an idea of the human mind as being always in a process of mediating the real world and the drives of sex and aggression – which if not moderated can lead to terrible…

“Instead of the analyst being in a position where they know something about the patient, they are with the patient. As Winnicott says in his late work, if you are a philosopher in your armchair, you have to come out of your armchair and be on the floor with the child playing. I don’t think…

“I made a film for PepWeb on the research of Beatrice Beebe. I made the video for her picture book, The Mother-Infant Interaction Picture Book, and various other short films. These are deep dives into mother-infant dyads that reveal something, i.e. rupture and repair, various kinds of dyadic interchanges. These are available for free on…

“We know as analysts there’s a long literature on mourning and its connection to creativity from the time of Freud’s work to George Pollock’s work and others – but that’s too intellectual; let me make it more personal, and then I’ll talk about Freud and Maimonides. My father and my mother lost a combination of…

“Conscience represents ethics that are not socially constructed and not socially learned but built-in. In fact, the whole of psychoanalysis is grounded in such an ethic – we all as analysts value life over death, we value truth over lies, we value love over hate, kindness over cruelty. Like those little three-month-old infants that Bloom…