“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…

“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…