Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch
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
A Cure by Love and Science with Mark Solms, PhD (Cape Town)
Although I believe that transference interpretation is the core mechanism of change in psychoanalysis, I don't believe it's the only mechanism. I think there are other things that go on too. I also think that alongside the transference relationship, there's a real relationship. The final chapter of the book is titled "A Cure by Love", and I do think that in the real relationship between patient an
From the Music Studio to the Consulting Room with Edmund Sprunger, MSW (St. Louis)
"In analytic training, and actually through my own analysis, is really where it happened. I think I just got more of a sense that whatever was going on with my students and the parents of my students was maybe not about me. It might not be all up to me, and something about that really freed me up to do better work. Another way I'll describe what you're talking about is that I had an adult violin s
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis in Time of War: Iran Today with Gohar Homayounpour, PsyD (Paris)
"How do we continue doing this work when the socio-political realities are unimaginable? I've been living in Paris the last few years, and I continue to have a full caseload in Tehran and other cities. There was a time that the internet was cut off for our Iranian patients, so there is reality, and then there is a reality that actually affects the frame - they couldn't contact their analyst. But
From Couch to Page: The Craft of Psychodynamic Case Writing with Aner Govrin, PhD (Tel Aviv)
"We have a trove of treasure. These are the case studies, and we need the case studies - these are the flora and fauna of our field. This is how we work. We work by reading case studies and they enrich us. Not only do they enrich the community, but they also enrich us as therapists who write their case studies, and they get to be involved in deeper layers of the actual case study. When we write a
My Journey from Veterinary Medicine to Psychoanalysis with Michele Gaspar, DVM,MA,LCPC (Chicago)
"I have always been fascinated by the world of animals. What fascinated me about them is that when you pay attention to animals, this is a world beyond words. Words are not part of their world, so you start paying attention to movement, to breath, to reaction, to the pause, all these things, and I found it fascinating…Certainly, in veterinary medicine, as any type of clinical medical practice, if
The Analyst as Transference and Developmental Object with Carla Neely, PhD (Washington, DC)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"[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)
"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)
"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)
"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
Teaching About the Dynamic Mind: Then and Now with Jonathan Shedler, PhD (San Francisco)
"We bring our patterns with us wherever we go, into every relationship, and we necessarily and inevitably bring them into the therapy relationship or the psychoanalytic relationship, because that's a relationship too. It's not a matter of choice. It simply happens. It happens everywhere. The therapist doesn't do anything to make it happen. This is the human condition. We bring our patterns. The th
On Transience and the Cycle of Time: Freud and Ecclesiastes with Paul Marcus, PhD (Great Neck, New York)
"The similarity between Freud and Kohelet [Ecclesiastes] is that both of them believe that there's no overarching totalistic system that integrates all the disparate experiences that one has. You have that, Freud says, in psychotics, and you have that in philosophers, and you have that in devout people - they look for systematicity. They try to cram everything into a framework of meaning. Both F
A Memoir of Transformation: a patient examines two analyses at two stages of life with Joan Peters, PhD (Ojai, California)
"With Kristi [second analyst], it was much, much deeper. This whole dependent and infantile part of me was coming out. This is psychoanalytic language - I was moving into a regression that was terrifying, because I had been trained by my mother, and it was my nature, and it was what had worked for me to really approach things as an 'independent person' ie I don't need anybody; I don't need anythin
Psychotherapeutic Aphorisms: Reflections from a Lifetime of Listening with David Joseph, MD (Washington DC)
"Some time ago, I realized that there was such a thing for me as experiencing my patients as being friends, but they were psychoanalytic friends. It was a psychoanalytic friendship that was quite unique and unlike any other friendship. I think that's what people are talking about when they write about psychoanalytic love. It's not love like any other kind of relationship, because the psychoanalyti
An Analyst's Reflections on Her Treatments and Her Life with Beverly Kolsky, MSW (Tupper Lake, New York)
"This really is the full motivation for my having written the memoir. I want people to know what the process is like; not only what the process is like but what the feelings are that don't really make you think of psychoanalysis as a way of changing your life. We're just living and hoping that things will change without really taking account of the fact that we could be living better lives and in
When We Feel Provoked by the Politics of Our Patients with Heribert Blass, Dr. Med. (MD) (Dusseldorf, Germany)
"I think that the comparison [between political and erotic passions] is related to the danger of transgressing boundaries from the side of the analyst. It's not totally the same, but it's because of the emotions and the danger of being too much involved as an analyst, if you don't pay attention to what is happening in ourselves with our own emotions, then it can be similar. I think both are impor
Analysts' Reflections on Their Parenting with Andy Cohen (Johannesburg)
"I was quite protective of the parent reader while I was editing this. I feel that so many of the books out there on the shelf have a real kind of finger wagging quality to parents. They kind of tell parents what to do, what not to do, mostly what they're doing wrong. I felt like I wanted to create a resource that empathized with the parents' position, and that protected them, because this is lit
From Reacting to Reflecting: "How Psychoanalysis Made Us Better Surgeons" with Mauro Vasella, MD and Flavio Vasella, MD, PhD (Zurich)
"I have had quite some reactions to the article [on their psychoanalyses]. I was also telling Mauro and my colleagues that out of quite a number of articles I've published on maybe more pressing issues in the field of cancer research, for example, brain tumor research that I've spent quite some time with, I think it's actually the article [on psychoanalysis] that probably prompted the most reactio
'Why is This Happening in My Body'?: the meeting of/between patients' imaginings and analysts' theories with Sharone Bergner, PhD (New York)
"I really think that the purpose is to make space for the unknown, uncertainty, and for our kind of humility in the face of the complexity of our belonging to the physical world. So it's our animality, our physicality, all of that is so complicated and difficult to grapple with. The unknown is uncontrollable and is a huge abyss, as we know, for everybody. I do think that I'm trying to pivot here a
Affairs: Exploring the Dynamic Mind with non-Clinical Readers with Juliet Rosenfeld(London)
"The subject of affairs, I think it's of interest to everybody. We have all had an Oedipal experience - we've all been babies who have at some point realized that we are not the only person. We're not perfectly fused with our mother, and she has other things to do, and there may be a father. We've all known what rejection feels like, and probably betrayal, and I think that affairs are in our uncon
Affects, Curiosity, and Corporal Punishment with Paul Holinger, MD, MPH (Chicago)
"Now's the time to tell that wonderful story of the little boy. He was about two or three years old, and he went in the icebox to get some milk, and he managed to get this big carton and spill it all over the floor. Now, needless to say, there'd be a lot of parents that would react very negatively and frustrated - this mother happened to be a scientist. So she came in, she saw the bottle of milk,
The 'Necessary Foreignness' of Psychoanalysis with Mariano Horenstein, PhD (Cordoba, Argentina)
"In the analysis, the place where you face the experience of otherness, of foreignness, of the unconscious that goes through you, it doesn't appear as knowledge. Of course, in an analysis, you get a lot of knowledge, but it's not an important aspect of an analysis. I think that in the analysis, and that's the idea of using that word 'transmission' instead of 'teaching', what you receive is somethi
Care of a Former Analysand with Dementia with Maxine Anderson, MD (Seattle, Washington)
"I think that my analytic awareness of denial and projection and the concreteness of psychic reality when executive function wanes, that I could help the other caretakers to understand some of what was going on - to give them a way to understand that relieves their sense of frustration and uncertainty. I think that the analytic awareness of denial, of projection, that these things are not generall
Before 'Ghosts' become 'Ancestors' with Shalini Masih, PhD (Worcestershire, UK)
"All of this together shaped how I began to think about mind, not as something to be mastered, but as a landscape of the unspoken whether it was ghosts or griefs or desires that were hard to relinquish. I saw that the ghost was not always an 'other'. It was often intimate, tied to lost ones, sometimes to unmet desires, to unbearable longings, but in some ways possession was an attempt to keep clos
Candidates' Reflections on their Psychoanalytic Training with Himanshu Agrawal, MD (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
"The theme that I found with IPSO [International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization] was that there was a common theme [in psychoanalytic training]. There was an initial phase full of terror and excitement, and then a middle phase of maybe some lethargy or apathy or disillusionment. In that middle phase, many candidates found IPSO, or IPSO found them, where they found refuge. They found solace
Reflections on Our Changing Field with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)
"When we reconstruct [in a patient] a possible lacking object or role or function, we see that if the analyst himself has been able and the patient allowing him to be able to enter to a deep level the objective reality of the internal world of the patient, it can happen that some new function or position can be achieved. This is something that could be rare but it happens. This is one more reason
Discovering the Process of One's Mind with Fred Busch, PhD (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)
"The original papers that were written about the analyst's unconscious being attuned to the patient's unconscious by Hyman and Racker, in both cases they talk about this phenomenon. But both of them utter a caution, which is that one always has to take into account one's own 'mishegas'. Essentially, what they're saying is, the unconscious is pretty individualistic and we have our own things, and
Religion, 'Allegorical Objects' and Levinas with David Black, PhD (London)
"The idea of analytic neutrality, which was more or less a cliche truth when I was training back in the 1980s, is clearly getting at something very important, which is that we mustn't try to pre-conceive where the patient's development is going to take him or her. But that doesn't mean that the development is not in a direction. Aristotle famously said that the human being is a 'zoon politikon', a
Childhood Memories: Their Impact on Mothers and Their 0–3-year-old Children with Ilene Lefcourt (New York)
"There are very specific fears that people have that are specifically related to their own childhood, and I'd like to give an example. A mom with twins had a kidnapping fear. She was afraid every time she saw a car drive by her house that her twins would be kidnapped. Now this mother was herself adopted when she was a newborn, but her adoption did not become final until she was one year old. Her t
Forbidden Intimacy: Marrying the 'Other' with Ashis Roy, PhD (Kolkata, India)
"The amount of guilt and the sense of alienation that people feel when they fall in love with someone who is 'outside', and the struggle that they have to undergo to explain that choice which they fully don't understand themselves, is a very deep conflict that my work tries to capture. The title of my book is 'Intimacy in Alienation', and alienation is something that is really very pregnant in the
The Making of the Documentary: Outsider. Freud with Yair Qedar (Tel Aviv)
"I belong to the race that in the Middle Ages was blamed for all the plagues and such experiences have a sobering effect, and they do not arouse the tendency to believe in illusions. Much of my life has been devoted to trying to shed illusions. But if there is an illusion worth believing in, at least partially, this is the illusion: that we learn how to divert the impulse of destruction from our o
A Fourth Pillar: Unlocking the Power of Case Writing in Analytic Training with Stephen B. Bernstein, MD (Brookline, Mass.)
"I've had the experience of having some wonderful supervisees, many of whom have done quite fine work and where it has not been an issue of any kind of great concerns. And allowing the candidate to see what's written and also discussing it with them, obviously makes it quite easy for them to get both positive input, but also at times, input that will help them evolve and deepen their work even mor
The Unspoken: Analyst's 'Delinquencies', Post-Treatment Contact and Aging with Joyce Slochower, PhD (New York)
"I feel so strongly about this [collective commemorative ritual]. I think that early psychoanalytic writing overemphasized the value of separation-individuation and pathologized the opposite. It's been through personal experience that I have come to see that in a different way with regard to Jewish commemorative ritual which takes place a couple of times a year. But also some experiences that I ha
Poetry of the Mind and the Process of Mourning with Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD (Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts)
"What Freud may have missed here is that the investment in the lost object is a much more reconstructive and integrative process. It's one where we remember all the stories that we have heard from the lost object - the repetitive stories about the childhood of the person or how they met significant others and all these stories are within us and revived, and we have questions. We think: 'Too bad I
"Before Painting the Bird, You Must Become the Bird" with Jonathan Palmer, MD (Newton, Mass.)
"A number of art schools in the early 60s said: "Clearly, it is the relationship of the painter to the medium that is the essence of painting - the painter must be emotionally present, and this is what we should instill in our students." So they started to take away traditional training in art schools of representational drawing, of color theory, of figurative drawing, and what they ended up with
Trauma and Survival: Eddy de Wind and Viktor Frankl with Dan Stone, PhD (London)
"The Holocaust seems to me to be the paradigmatic case of the acting out of unconscious fears, fantasies and projections onto another group that has ever occurred. It is the place therefore for psychoanalytic concepts in understanding anti-Semitism and racism more generally. Particularly in this context and thinking about Nazism and Nazi perpetrators is crucial, especially given what for me is so
Psychoanalysis and the Working Through of a Vineyard's Slave History with Mark Solms, PhD (Cape Town)
"The historian [of the vineyard] gave us regular feedback on what she was finding, and she also brought in oral historians to take our own life histories. There's also a psychoanalytical point to be made here - you can take refuge in this scholarly exercise, going into archives and finding out things that happened hundreds of years ago, you can all too easily remove yourself from that: 'This is wh
Chaos and Transformation in Psychoanalysis: 'the Bet on Freedom' with Gabriela Goldstein, Ph.D. (Buenos Aires)
"I think it is very interesting to open a debate and talk about this impact of the culture, this epoch, in the subjectivity and never losing the internal work within psychoanalysis, within our consulting room. So when I quote the Lacanian way of saying the 'declination of the father's name', I am talking about these times, this epoch, in which the reference and the subjectivity fails in respecti
A Sociologist/Psychoanalyst Writes a Novel/Memoir with Roberta Satow, PhD (Washington, CT)
"I was very interested in the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the patient because I think one of the things about free association is that in the beginning most of what's going on with the patient is unsaid. As the analysis evolves more and more of the unspoken becomes spoken and more of it becomes at the center of the analytic space. I wanted to show the evolution of the unsaid. At the beginni
An Analyst's Journey with Cancer with Jhuma Basak, PhD (Calcutta)
"There was a lot of dilemma, and I wasn't able to definitely deal with the sudden knowledge of my cancer and to be able to impart that information in a more containing and structured manner so that my patients can be held even in that situation. But the consciousness was there about how to go about it. Whenever I was asked by the patient directly, or if the necessity arose where the hospital neede
Transformation of Dreams in Analysis: the Research Findings with Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Prof. Dr. Phil. (Frankfurt)
"In my own two analyses, I had observed such transformations for me in a very impressive way. I started my own analysis after the traumatic death of my sister when I was 22 years old. At that time, I had a breakdown, and I suffered from severe depressive and psychosomatic symptoms and sleep disorders but also from terrible nightmares that haunted me almost every night. Fortunately, my two analyses
Secrets Kept and Secrets Told: the Analyst's Responsibility with Barbara Stimmel, PhD (New York)
"I don't know what to do about this because we do have to use clinical material. It's the best tried and true method in which to inculcate analytic thinking in our students and supervises. On the other hand, we are so indebted to our patients and their trust in us and our responsibilities as ethical practitioners not to divulge their privacy. Principles are what we're trying to teach, we're not tr
The Adventure of Immersive Analytic Training with Dr. Eike Hinze (Berlin)
"During the whole course of your [psychoanalytic] training, you are laying on the couch and have your personal analysis and beforehand you don't know where it will lead you. You start to discover corners of your unconscious psyche which you don't want, which you are not so eager to explore. This accompanies you during the whole course of training, always confronted with your own psyche and with n
Adjunctive Psychedelic Medicines during Dynamic Psychotherapy with Charis Cladouhos, MD (Boston)
"I would love for the psychoanalytic world to re-embrace some of these adjunctive treatments that get to non-ordinary states of consciousness in order to enhance psychoanalytic treatment, and that includes psychedelics. The other thing I'd like to see is, I think psychoanalysts are extremely well suited to use psychedelic-assisted therapy in a non-harmful way. I really believe that without an ongo
The Dying Patient in Treatment with Mark Moore, PhD (Philadelphia) and Peggy Warren, MD (Boston)
"What is it like to be a clinician with a patient who either comes because they're going to be dying or it happens in the treatment - what is it like for the clinician? It's lonely in a way because there is a lot of parallel with what the patient is going through. To me, and as a field, I would like to think we could talk about this and write about it. My peer group at the time was terribly impor
Bystanding as Perversion: "We need to forget about what we actually did not even see here." with Jan Borowicz, PhD (Warsaw)
"From such accounts [of Polish atrocities] we can see how incredibly emotional and how incredibly pleasurable it could be on the social level, not only for the people involved, but for the whole group, and we can really see how violence on others becomes the core of social identity, of the national identity. We tend to think about committing violence as anti-social, and that Eros is the only forc
An Analyst's Hindu-Indian Imagination with Sudhir Kakar (Goa, India)
My conversation with Sudhir Kakar took place five weeks before his untimely death on April 22nd. "Freud obviously is very brave and courageous to accept that the world is inadequate and that my desires will never be sufficiently fulfilled. My question - is this in fact the case? I think that everyone has had some kind of spiritual experience, some more than others and in many different contexts,
'Does it Still Taste like Psychoanalysis'? - University Affiliation in Finland with Jan Johansson (Helsinki)
"Psychoanalysis landed in Finland in the 50s; before the Second World War there were one or two persons familiar with psychoanalysis. In the 50s, psychoanalysis got a lot of interest in Finland but then there was no possibility of training in Finland. The pioneers went abroad, some to Sweden and some to Switzerland. They picked up the theoretical preferences in the new countries and new institutes
The Presence of 'Companioning' in Psychoanalysis with Robert Grossmark, PhD (New York)
"My interest is to rather than continue with the psychoanalytic tilt which has tended to try to find the words - to find the areas of the analyst that has words to engage with these states and then help the patient transform these states into something thinkable and communicable. [In contrast] my interest has been to take the patient where they are; it's kind of a radical way of saying 'meeting th
The Dynamic Underpinnings of the Eating Disorders with Tom Wooldridge, PsyD (San Francisco)
"The first line treatment for adolescents with anorexia now is family-based therapy typically, which involves helping the parents facilitate the refeeding of the adolescent. So, I was working with the patient in that way and found it to be helpful and useful, but was consistently struck by the neglect of the patient's inner life, and found, at least based on my experience with many patients, that
Why Winnicott? - Part II: The Surviving Object Joel Whitebook, Ph.D. (New York), interviews Jan Abram, Ph.D. (London).
"The ability to play means we can indulge in a kind of illusion, not delusion, and make a distinction. It always amazes me that when the patient arrives, they like the routine of an analysis; nobody breaks that, it's an illusion; it is a piece of theater every time. We open the door to our patients and they lie on the couch, and yet there is something enormously gratifying as the patient works out
Female Sexuality in India Today: Through an Analytic Lens with Amrita Narayanan, PsyD (Goa, India)
"I was speaking to the tendency of the popular media to perceive narratives of Indian women's sexuality via the lens of oppression. Now, of course, sexual violence against women is an important concern in India, as it is worldwide. But telling the story of violence against women misses the story of how women desire, which is what I wanted to highlight. What struck me from reading the responses fro
Infertility and its Unconscious Reverberations with Mali Mann, MD (San Francisco)
"The genetic asymmetry [with sperm donorship] will create issues and complications - it puts a strain on the relationship, i.e. who is excluded; who has more rights to this product? In other words, if the sperm donor is from a stranger, the father feels 'am I really adequately or sufficiently related that I could claim fatherhood'?" Episode Description: We begin by acknowledging the erroneous
The Repair of a Frame Gone Awry with Alan Karbelnig, PhD (Pasadena, California)
"As I elaborate in the book, there was no physical contact or romantic engagement. The reason why I chose the 'lover' as the [psychoanalytic] analogy is, in the real world outside of psychoanalytic practice, where else do you have an interpersonal encounter that is so intensely engaging, attentive, respectful, and caring? That would be in the first six weeks or six months of a romantic relationshi
An Analyst's Catholicism with Ginta Remeikis, MD (Rockville, Maryland)
"What's the spiritual room? For me, it does tend to be a connection to something greater than just me; it is a contemplative space; it is getting to the core of who I am, allowing in some ways for the best of me to come to the fore; to have space for grace. I am humbled by what people bring to tell me. I take what I'm doing in the office very seriously because it is really like sacred work in term
Our Oral Tradition and the Aging Analyst with Nancy McWilliams, PhD (Lambertville, New Jersey)
"My analysis not only allowed me to grieve [my mother], with my analyst patiently pushing me in the direction of my feelings, but it radically transformed my life. I wouldn't have had kids if I hadn't had my analysis because I thought 'I'm an ambitious person, I want a career, you can't do everything'. I didn't know any models of women who had a career and enjoyed motherhood. In my analysis I lear
The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis with Peter Goldberg, Ph.D., Michael Levin, Psy.D and Adam Blum, Psy.D (San Francisco Bay Area)
"The fact that music is so important for our constitution - that music is almost how we move in the world, that our own bodies are played through by musical forms, that the way we relate to our own way of being in the world is sort of mediated by music - this is powerful stuff. But it's not always very fitting to us. We hear a lot of music in our lives, we don't always choose what we hear. We don'
IPA Prejudices, Discrimination and Racism Committee with Abel Fainstein, MD (Buenos Aires)
"Discrimination is something that is needed for the child to create himself as a person. You need to be discriminated from the other, and the other is useful for you, as Freud said, as a model, as a rival, as an enemy. There are different kinds of relationships with the other - you need the other, and we are persons connected with the other. If you discriminate you from the other, this is benign.
Acute Psychoanalytic Care of the Victims of the October 7th Massacre with Merav Roth, Ph.D. and Mira Ehrlich-Ginor, Ph.D. (Tel Aviv)
"The situation was that I went with my husband Danny, who is also a clinical psychologist, and we were on the team that came and told people when family members were identified and that they had been murdered. There was one time when we went to two kids, telling them that their parents were murdered. We were with them in the room with an aunt and another family member. All of a sudden, I said, "D
Treatment of Child Soldiers: Traditional Healers and their Dynamic Underpinnings with Martha Bragin, PhD MSW (New York)
"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 things. We're in there, and that's what our training helps us to do." Episode Description: We begin with Martha d
Why Winnicott? Joel Whitebook, PhD (New York) interviews Jan Abrams, PhD (London)
"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 that one should act that out with an adult patient- however it is that approach to actually being with the p
From Filmmaking to Psychoanalysis with Karen Dougherty, FIPA (Toronto)
"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 YouTube. That's another way that I use my analytic self and m
The Presence of Religion within the Psychoanalytic Dyad with Nathan Szajnberg, MD (Palo Alto)
"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 10 siblings and a granddaughter murdered by the Nazis, plus their parents and aunts and
Superego, Conscience and the Narcissism of our Times with Don Carveth, PhD (Toronto)
"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 studied at Yale, these values are grounded in our biology. T
Are Patients Different Today? with Stefano Bolognini, MD (Bologna)
"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 thanks to these similarities and continuities. I would say like all my colleagues I asked for analy
From Technology to Psychoanalysis with Nicolle Zapien, PhD (Oakland)
"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 or for developing a life that's meaningful. I think a psychological minds
High - Conflict Divorce: Psychoanalytic Perspectives with Arthur Leonoff, Ph.D. (Ottawa)
"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 to the continuing sense of responsibility to that other. Even though the marriage doesn't survive, the family needs t
The Role of Defense Analysis in Child (and Adult) Treatment with Leon Hoffman, MD (New York)
"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 what the patient is doing right now." Episode Description: Leon sh
Freud's Nephew and the Creation of 'Buzz' around Psychoanalysis with Joseph Malherek, Ph.D. (Raleigh, North Carolina)
"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 to write an introduction for what was published in 1920 as 'A General Introduction to
Technique is Character Rationalized with Lee Grossman, MD (Oakland, Ca.)
"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 on to the subtle and irreproducible nuances of clinical work. Candidates tend to latch on to theory and d
One Analyst - Two Continents: Treatment Differences? with Jeanne Wolff- Bernstein, Ph.D. (Vienna)
"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 and thinking: 'Now the patient is in the paranoid/schizoid position…' that would be disastrous. You have to liste
International Commentaries on the State of our Field with Fred Busch, Ph.D. (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)
"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 field in general is drifting into sociology so that our nation
Children Exposed to Pornography: the Erosion of Latency with Franco D'Alberton, Ph.D. & Andrea Scardovi, MD, Ph.D. (Bologna)
"They interviewed more than 6,000 American parents and their children from ages eight to thirteen. They wanted to identify what the perception and realities were of the parents' use of technology. It is important to know that about one-third of the children said that their parents spent equal or less time with them than in using their devices. Over half of the children felt that their parents ch
Recommended
Doctor Zhivago Slow Read
Apple News In Conversation
SLOW ENGLISH PODCAST (A1-A2) With Subtitles | Daily Videos | English With Us Podcast
Breaking News from Pod Save America
The Young and Called Podcast .
Jubal Phone Pranks from The Jubal Show
TopMusic Piano Podcast
The Daily
World News Tonight with David Muir
The Joe Rogan Experience
TED Talks Daily
English Vocabulary Help
