“I think every encounter with the patient is a potential re-humanizing experience, also for me as a therapist. Because when we are slowly experiencing this kind of positive emotion, especially when it comes to turning points, where the patient  realizes that it is possible to trust another human being, that is a really remarkable experience…

“We are chosen [as children] for the roles of peacekeeper, soother, and possibly entertainer at times, because we temperamentally have been gifted with a certain degree of empathy, sensitivity, and psychological mindedness that was not true of our siblings. There is a reason why we’ve been chosen, and it is because of our innate abilities….

“Everyone was all for inclusion. There wasn’t anybody who felt that this movement for inclusion was anything but good. But there were a lot of worries that in our focus on inclusion that we’ve turned away from thinking about the teaching of analysis per se – of what goes on with the analyst and the…

“What you are describing in the process of reading the book is what I am aspiring to which is a kind of deep emotional dialogue both in the book with the reader, but also in my work with the patient. I am more concerned with the experiential nature of our work and what it means…

“The role that an analyst plays is so important in terms of how people can be wounded, shamed and hurt in a variety of different ways. We need to be very thoughtful about our own residual psychopathology because no analyst is perfectly analyzed. It’s a lifelong stretch that we are going through to try to…

“You can do as much about the legacy of the Holocaust – and what I took from my depressed mother who lost all her family in the Holocaust – there is only so much I could do in personal analysis and there was another bit that I could do only in a strange kind of…

“The father carries the separation function which is very important in terms of progressive differentiation from the mother rather than forceful opposition. It rests on something else that I think that we in psychoanalysis don’t take seriously enough – though Peter Blos did when he talked about the isogender attachment. The father also has to…

“I have some very close friends in Russia and some of them emigrated now and some of them are in Russia. Of course, I can speak with them very personally about my experience. I see how much guilt they feel and how much pressure they feel from both sides, from inside Russia and outside. For…

“One of the things that I find absolutely remarkable about psychedelic medicines is the access one can have into discovering different parts of  oneself, different ways in which we’re put together  Also, to see how we shape our worlds in a very interesting way, experientially. That has been shocking to me – to see and…

“We understand that we are not alone. It is crucially important to feel like that because we are a large country compared to other European countries – we are the largest country in Europe and have 45 million population. But in comparison to Russia it is very small and actually the Russian army is the…