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Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

Harvey Schwartz MD 100 Episodes Jun 14, 2026

Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch is a podcast that explores the application of psychoanalytic concepts beyond the traditional clinical setting. Hosted by Harvey Schwartz MD, the show delves into how psychoanalytic thinking can illuminate various aspects of culture, art, and everyday life. Each episode features discussions with experts and practitioners who bring psychoanalytic perspectives to topics such as literature, film, politics, and personal relationships. The podcast aims to make psychoanalysis accessible and relevant to a broad audience.

Episodes

The Analyst as Transference and Developmental Object with Carla Neely, PhD (Washington, DC) Jun 14, 2026 56:57 "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 inner lives, despite the fact that we work hard not to let our own selves int
AI, Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis with Amy Levy, PhD (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) May 31, 2026 56:17 "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 access truth and meaning and find proper direction
Analytic Endings: When Enough is Enough and When it Isn't with Joyce Slochower, PhD (New York) May 17, 2026 54:35 "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 choose not to follow, but at least you'll know what you're not following.
My Evolution as an Analyst with Virginia Ungar, MD (Buenos Aires) May 3, 2026 56:43 "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 I'm still observing mo
How We Care for Ourselves (and each other) with Stephen Bernstein, MD, Melvin Bornstein, MD, Mark Moore, PhD, Jonathan Palmer, MD, Harvey Schwartz, MD, Peggy Warren, MD Apr 19, 2026 01:00:55 "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 go to an emotional authenticity that's very compelling… Somehow, we've gotten to a place whe
Mothers and Their Little Girls with Ilene Lefcourt (New York) Apr 5, 2026 01:02:54 "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 to the genital difference and nudity will change, and
A Memoir of Analysis, Poetry and Mortality with Alice Jones, MD (Berkeley, California) Mar 22, 2026 58:04 "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 in and out of this form of work. I began this segment when my father-in-law was dying, and it began as a s
A Candidate Engages Patients Who are 'Difficult to Reach' with Pamela Polizzi, LCSW (New York) Mar 8, 2026 55:39 "This came from an experience with a patient. It was early in my analytic training, and I was working with a supervisor who I really admired, and worked with her for a number of years. She was post-Kleinian, and was great at interpretation, formulation, and she was really helpful with just starting to guide me towards a lot of this work. I remember describing to her a patient session, and I was go
An Analyst's 'Couple State of Mind' with Mary Morgan, (London) Feb 22, 2026 01:03:06 "[A couple state of mind] is the capacity to be subjectively involved with both individuals, but then importantly, to be able to step back, find a third position, and try to understand what the couple are creating together. Although it's kind of obvious in a way, because surely, that's what a couple therapist is doing, they're trying to understand the couple relationship. It can have quite a power
When the Analytic Frame 'Groans' with Allannah Furlong, PhD (Montreal) Feb 8, 2026 01:00:53 "To come back to this idea of 'groaning' - I really like it because I think it's a good description of the work we do, but particularly because it refers to Antonio Ferro's concept of the absorbency of the frame, which I think is another way of referring to it, that the frame can take a little give and take, that there's something organic about it. It has a structure, but it's absorbent, it can mo
The Syntax of Trauma: Parasitic Language, Metaphor and Metonymy with Dana Amir, PhD (Haifa, Israel) Jan 25, 2026 58:56 "A saturated state is a state in which the conceptual or emotional object has absolute value, it is already stacked or closed to new meanings and therefore cannot undergo any kind of transformation. An unsaturated state, on the other hand, is a state in which the emotional or conceptual object is in an open state in which it is still open to transformation, to new meanings, to all kinds of change.
The Unique Characteristics of Supportive Therapy with Rodrigo Sanchez Escandon (Leeds, England) Jan 11, 2026 01:08:58 "This patient taught me a lot. The context was that I just finished my second training as a psychodynamic psychotherapist and I felt I needed to prove a lot, and I clearly arrived with the wrong agenda. It was that if I was good enough and smart enough, a clever enough just graduated psychodynamic psychotherapist, I would manage to get into why the patient is struggling so much with the realizatio

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