“They forced me into this tiny little interrogation room off the big anteroom, a whole mob of policemen shouting and screaming. I thought I would perish there, that I was going to die there and then, which was exactly what they wanted me to think. Their intention was to overwhelm me with terror, and they…

“I observe what many of the French analysts and my supervisees say [about online treatment] – they are absolutely happy by how fantastic the patients talk, they talk much easier than before, they have dreams, and they relate their dreams and even sexual fantasies which they never did before. I understand them of course because…

“A decade ago I started to tell my colleagues that there is something big here in the therapeutic room and if we don’t talk about it in the room and in supervision there’s something we are missing here. We are not talking just about two people who can speak only on the humanistic level –…

“Thousands or millions of people who will never meet each other sharing certain sentiments – these sentiments have historical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. When I started this, of course, conflicts between large groups have certain realistic aspects as you can imagine: political, personal and legal ones, but underneath those I figured out that everything is…

“I was somebody who all throughout my academic career was very affected by good teachers. In fact, my becoming a psychologist – I took my first psychology undergraduate course as a junior and it had such a profound effect upon me that I stayed in college an extra year to get all the requirements to…

“She [his mother] felt that his kicking was deliberate evil and she responded with wishes for an abortion. She also stopped breastfeeding because she felt that the sucking was so strong and aggressive that it was destroying her. Without the father as a triangulating object he had no one to contain this – every child…

“In such moments [of shared danger] you work with the present and not the representation. In analysis we work all the time with representation – the transference is a representation, the countertransference is a representation. They are related to our past when such things happened. At these moments it’s not important if the patient goes…

“A big part of my graduate education at Harvard was critical thinking. The general idea that theories come and go, even the data come and go because it’s modified as new experimental paradigms that develop. So the idea of fixity. that “now we now know and it’s set in stone”, was not at all in…

“In the group that I co-chair on the Aging Analyst we’ve talked a lot about what difference it makes having practiced a long time. One of the ideas that emerged is not only that this varies from person to person, but that there is a lot more freedom to use some different approaches, less rigid,…

“I started to notice that the very things that I was seeing in patients on the couch were occurring at a much greater macro level in society – the issues of disavowal, of exceptionalism, of abandoning reality if it means that you have to give something up. That is why I got so interested in…