Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

"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...

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,...