“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…

“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…

“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…

“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…

“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…

“He [Bernays] proposed to his uncle that he’d do a translation of this book that had been given to him and Freud, perhaps without thinking too much about it,  approved the idea.  Bernays went about hiring a translator who was a psychology Ph.D. student that he found at Columbia University and he got Stanley Hall…

“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…

“When you’re with a patient you take all that you know in your head, all the theory, and you throw it away. You have to listen to the patient and then maybe afterward something becomes clear – you use that ‘in-between’ as a way maybe in the next session. But if you were sitting there…

“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…