“How do we continue doing this work when the socio-political realities are unimaginable? I’ve been living in Paris the last few years, and I continue to have a full caseload in Tehran and other cities. There was a time that the internet was cut off for our Iranian patients, so there is reality, and then…

“We have a trove of treasure. These are the case studies, and we need the case studies – these are the flora and fauna of our field. This is how we work. We work by reading case studies and they enrich us. Not only do they enrich the community, but they also enrich us as…

“I have always been fascinated by the world of animals. What fascinated me about them is that when you pay attention to animals, this is a world beyond words. Words are not part of their world, so you start paying attention to movement, to breath, to reaction, to the pause, all these things, and I…

“As analysts we have our own development – as humans we have our own development. My view is that the work of analysis, if the developmental piece is present, requires some relatively sophisticated developmental capacity on the part of the analyst. The work is intimate and the patient is going to know something of our…

“Humanism has been the dominant Western belief system of the last century. It’s based on the worship of human wisdom, human creation, human experience, human mind, and psychoanalysis has very much emerged from this humanist tradition. We believe in psychoanalysis, that delving into our feelings, our thoughts, and our shared wisdom will allow us to…

“When I train candidates I always say start with Freud, learn the interpersonalist, learn the object relations folks, know from what you come, even if you want to be a radical interpersonalist, a radical relationalist, because having that stuff in your back pocket is organizing and creates an ideal to which you can aspire or…

“I’m not suggesting that repression has lost its place as a fundamental defense mechanism. Repression remains central, coherent, and fundamental to the founding of the unconscious. It is what makes certain contents inaccessible to consciousness, and what we access as psychoanalysts through dreams, play, symptoms, and associations. That remains true. What I was observing, and…

“We are a group of analysts working in the greater context of the analytic world, but as a group, we have a profound analytic group process that’s evolved and in profoundly successful ways – we’ve become a group that contains one another, and deals with great difficulties. Mel has given a taste of where we…

“In addition to the easy convenience of bathing two children together, or three children together, there are other motivations of bathing them together. Parents are less aware that there is an excitement in seeing the children naked – although convenience is what’s stated first, I think other things do go into it. Through development reactions…

“All my writing before this has been poetry, and over the years in my books of poems I found the lines kept getting longer. I think the move towards prose had me working on this journal form, which I’ve not done. Many people write their journals their entire lives. For me, it’s a more dipping…