“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 we have to consider that possibly it's our own difficulties, our own unconscious, that is playing a bigger role in our countertransference reaction to the patient's unconscious.”

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the meaning of the many italics throughout the book and my sense of their being an expression of Fred's wish to be carefully understood. This is part of our conversation where we examine how internal reactions are used to comprehend another person's mind. There are a number of themes to this work, and to Fred's contributions over the years, which focus on helping individuals understand the way their mind works, as distinct from the particular contents of their mind. One of the gifts of psychoanalysis is to facilitate patient's discovery of the freedom to think which allows for a post-termination capacity for self-analysis. We discuss how self-criticism can serve as an unconscious lifeline, the importance of attending to the need for silence as distinct from what is not being said and the seductiveness of gossip, to name but a few of the topics in the book that we cover. Fred closes by describing "The wonderful thing about being a psychoanalyst is there are always things to learn and ways to grow."

Our Guest: Fred Busch, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He has published eight books, and over 80 articles on psychoanalytic technique, along with many book reviews and chapters in books.  His work has been translated into many languages, and he has been invited to present over 180 papers and clinical workshops nationally and internationally. His last six books are: Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind (2014); The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s Enigmatic Concept (2019); Dear Candidate: Analyst From Around the World Offer Personal Reflections on Psychoanalytic Training, Education, and the Profession (2020); A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique (2021), Psychoanalysis at the Crossroads: An International Perspective (2023).The Ego and Id: 100 years later (2023), How Does Analysis Cure? (2024).

Recommended Readings:

Busch, F. (2014). Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind: A Psychoanalytic

Method and Theory. London: Routledge.

Busch, F. (2019). The Analyst’s Reveries: Explorations in Bion’s

Enigmatic Concept. London: Routledge.

Busch, F. (2021). A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique: Selected

papers on Psychoanalysis. Routledge: London.

Busch, F. (2023) The Significance of the Ego in “The Ego

and the Id” and its Unfulfilled Promise. International Journal of

Psychoanalysis 104:1077-1090.

Busch, F. (2000). What is a deep interpretation? J. Amer. Psychoanal.Assn., 48:238-254.

Busch, F. (2005). Conflict Theory/Trauma Theory. Psychoanal.Q., 74: 27-46.

Busch, F. (2006). A shadow concept. Int.J.Psychoanal.,87: 1471-1485. Also appearing as Un oncerto ombra, Psycoanalisi, 11:5-26.

Busch, F. (2015). Our Vital Profession*. Int. J. Psycho-Anal.,

96(3):553-568. Reprinted in Busch, F. (2015). La nostra

professione vitale. Rivista Psicoanal., 61(2):435-456; Busch, F. (2015). Nuestra profesión vital*. Int. J. Psycho-Anal. Es., 1(3):605-627; Busch, F. (2015). Nuestra profesión vital1. Rev. Psicoanál. Asoc. Psico. Madrid, 75:131-153.

“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 creature who belongs in a somewhat structured society. Healthy development is in that sort of direction as we become more integrated, as our ‘ghosts become more like ancestors’, to use that famous metaphor. We become more aware of the reality of other people and their real as opposed to their fantasy importance in the ecosystem of which we are all part. And this makes possible the sort of ethical realization that Levinas was talking about. We recognize the reality of the other. We discover that we are interconnected. We are part of something that is hugely greater than ourselves and that goes beyond our knowing. But of course, that doesn't mean that we are not also selfish and unique selves. It's that we are under pressure, so to speak, from both quarters.” 

Episode Description: We begin with David's description of Freud's view of religion as offering  "compellingly attractive" illusions in the face of the helplessness we face by life's and death's unpredictability. Alternatively, David suggests that religions provide 'objects', ie Gods, that are importantly allegorical and offer an ‘ethical seriousness’ over time. We discuss the ability of these allegories to offer possibilities of 'transcendence' in a world that he sees as often limited to the material. He presents Levinas' view of the responsibility we all have when encountering "the face of the other" - a responsibility that is not chosen but "slipped into my consciousness like a thief." We consider the ethical differences between one’s superego and one's conscience. We close with David sharing with us the vicissitudes of his early life that, as for us all, form a context for our later interests.  

Our Guest: David Black studied philosophy and Eastern religions before training in London, first as a pastoral counsellor and later as a psychoanalyst. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, now retired, who has written widely on psychoanalysis in relation to matters of ethics and religion. In 2006 he edited Psychoanalysis and Religion in the Twenty-first Century. He has published two collections of his own psychoanalytic papers, most recently Psychoanalysis and Ethics: the Necessity of Perspective. He is also a poet and translator, whose translation of Dante’s Purgatorio was published in 2021 in the New York Review of Books Classics series. (It was later the winner of the annual American National Translation Award in Poetry.) Visit David Black’s website at: https://www.dmblack.net. 

Recommended Readings:

Black, D.M. Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective. (2024: Routledge New Library of Psychoanalysis.)

Chetrit-Vatine, V. Primal Seduction, Matricial Space, and Asymmetry in the Psychoanalytic Encounter. (2004: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 85: 4.

Lear, J. Wisdom Won from Illness. (2017: Harvard University Press.)

Lemma, A. First Principles: Applied Ethics for Psychoanalytic Practice. (2023: Oxford University Press.)

Levinas, E. Ethics as First Philosophy. In The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand. (1989: Blackwell Publishing.)

Loewald, H. Papers on Psychoanalysis. (1980: Yale University Press.)

“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 twins were approaching one year. I was struck by the anniversary of her fear of kidnapping, and when I asked her who she thought was driving the car that drove by her house, she blurted out, 'my biological mother - adoption was never an issue for me, I have the best parents,' she said, but her fears about her babies being kidnapped were rooted in her own guilty feelings. She said, 'I get to keep my biological babies and my biological mother did not. I can have biological babies and my adoptive mother could not.' Carrie’s fantasy that her biological mother was threatening to kidnap her babies represented both her fears of retaliation for her aggressive victories over both her biological mother and her adoptive mother, and the repair of her disavowed feeling of loss by a reunion with her biological mother. This meaning of the memory, this understanding of the memory, resolved her kidnapping fear. It dissolved.”

Episode Description: We begin with an overview of the importance of mothers' childhood memories in their experience of their own children. These memories are of the conscious sort and also the not-so conscious. They are of the loving as well as the misattuned versions. "The challenge for mothers is to understand the complexity of their own childhood memories and to help their babies and toddlers adapt to the everyday ups and downs of life, as well as to the exceptional ones." We discuss typical fears, sleep problems, 'mutually-regulated patterns', naming body parts, nakedness, weaning and screen time. Ilene ran mother-baby-toddler groups for 35 years and shares with us her relentless curiosity for what we all bring to the parenting experience.

Our Guest: In 1982, Ilene Lefcourt established the Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development - programs for parents and their children from birth to three years. She was the Director, led the Mother-Baby-Toddler Groups, and provided Developmental Consultation to parents for over 35 years. She saw over 1,000 families and taught Child Psychiatry Residents and Parent-Infant Psychotherapy Trainees about her work. She has been a faculty member at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center since 1995. Ms. Lefcourt is currently in private practice in New York City. She is the author of When Mothers Talk, Parenting and Childhood Memories, and Mother-Baby-Toddler Group Guide. Her forthcoming book is, Mothers and Daughters: The First Three Years. Visit Ilene’s website: http://ilenelefcourt.com/. 

Recommended Readings:

1975, Fraiberg S. Adelson E., Shapiro V., Ghosts in the Nursery,  Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14, 387-421

1975, Mahler, M., F. and Bergman, A. The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, Basic Books

1985, Main, M. Kaplan, N. Cassidy, J. Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A move to the Level of Representation. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

1991, Fonagy, P., Steele, M., Steele,H., Moran, G. S . The Capacity for Understanding Mental States. Infant Mental Health Journal, 12(3) 201-218

1992, Bretherton, I. The Origins of Attachment Theory. Developmental Psychology, 28(5) 759-775

1993, Lieberman, A ., The Emotional Life of the Toddler, Simon and Schuster 

1995, Stern, D. The Motherhood Constellation, Basic Books

1998, Stern, D., Brushwweiler-Stern, N. The Birth of a Mother. Basic Books

2005, Lieberman, A., Angels in The Nursery, Infant Mental Health Journal. Vol. 26(6) 

“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 identities of these individuals who feel like aliens to their own community because their community cannot imagine why are they seeing the other as something positive but not as how the community wants them to see. So there's a big gap that often gets deeper and it widens and it really forecloses any conversation and imagination.”

Episode Description: We begin with considering the nature of 'malignant othering' that Ashis describes in parts of the Hindu-Muslim interface in India. His thesis is that transcending the binary into a 'third' is essential in the "quest for newer foundations defining Hindu and Muslim identities that are freed from historically entrenched definitions." He describes the challenges faced by each community that lacks the imagination of what is positive in the other. We discuss the importance of family support for interfaith couples and how often that is lacking. He describes 'love-jihad' where the autonomous agency of the partners is, through the eyes of fundamentalism, reduced to stereotypes of oppressor-oppressed. Ashis describes his research methodology which borrows from the psychoanalytic method in its recognition of transference and repetition. He closes by sharing with us the impact on him of the riots of 2002 and behind that the latent presence of the atrocities of the 1947 Partition. He bemoans "the erosion of the narratives of harmony" and sees his work as his effort at healing.

Our Guest: Ashis Roy (PhD) is a Psychoanalyst at the Delhi Chapter of the Indian Psychoanalytic  Society ( IPA London). He works with adults and couples. For more than a decade he was on the Faculty at the Centre of Psychotherapy and Clinical Research, Ambedkar University, where he participated in institution building, taught psychoanalysis, and trained students to become Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists.  He is a faculty at CAPA (China-American Psychoanalytic Alliance) and is interested in exploring Asian and South Asian cultures using psychoanalysis. He hosts podcasts on the New Books Network and works with psychoanalysts across the globe. His book, Intimate Hindu-Muslim Relationships: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Self and the Other (2024) has been published by Yoda Press.

Recommended Readings:

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: W.W. Norton.

Kakar, S. (1996). The colors of violence: Cultural identities, religion, and conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wahab. G (2021) Born a Muslim: Some truths about Islam in India.  Aleph Book Company.

Altman, N. (2005). The Analyst in the Inner City. Relational Perspective Book Series 

Davids, M. F. (2009) The Impact of Islamophobia. Psychoanalysis and History 11:175-191

Green, A., & Kohon, G. (2005). Love and its vicissitudes. London: Routledge.

“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 own kind, how to stop hating each other because of trivial differences, and stop killing each other for profits. That we stop taking advantage of the achievements of progress to control the forces of nature in a way that will lead to our destruction. Without this illusion, what future awaits us?” 

Sigmund Freud, Letter to Romain Rolland, 1923

“I found [this letter] in the collection that Eran Rolnik translated into Hebrew. I met it in the Hebrew version, and when I got back to the German, something else happened. In the Hebrew translation it was talking about the ‘hope’. But then the people in Vienna told me in German this is not ‘hope’, this is ‘illusion’. I thought it is even more powerful that he speaks about the power of illusion, the needed illusion. It also brought me back to the beginning of my journey when a friend said the main purpose of the film is to have Freud telling us something like the ‘big father’, how should we live today? A tip and insight from Freud. So this is an insight from Freud, a message from Freud over time to us now. I'm not sure it's prophetic. I think there's no prophecies, but it speaks to us now. It speaks to us now.” 

Episode Description: We begin with an opening quote from Freud that characterized his sense of being an 'outsider'. Yair then shares with us his own personal journey of discovering Freud as distinct from his father. Having some analytic exposure awakened in him the capacity to, like Freud, ignite his creativity and discover Freud anew. Unique among the many Freud documentaries, Yair utilizes 3D animation techniques as well as dreamlike imagery, newly uncovered archival film and evocative music to invite the viewer to regressively experience the possibilities of the unconscious. We go through four periods of Freud's life which include his struggles with Viennese antisemitism, his discovery of the role of childhood sexuality, his illness and the deaths of his father, daughter, granddaughter and mother and his exile to London. We conclude with his 1923 letter to Romain Rolland where he pleads "that we stop taking advantage of the achievements of progress to control the forces of nature in a way that will lead to our destruction.” 

Our Guest: Yair Qedar is an Israeli documentary filmmaker, social activist and former journalist. In his project "the Hebrews", he had been chronicling the lives of Jewish and Israeli figures of the modern Hebrew literary canon. Qedar's 19 feature length documentaries have all premiered at film festivals and have won the director over 30 prizes. Also, Qedar is a leading LGBTQ activist and created the first Israeli LGBTQ newspaper.

To View the Film: This documentary was first shown at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna on January 9th, 2025. It is currently being screened at film festivals worldwide. To arrange a viewing, please contact Yair Qedar at [email protected] 

Website and Trailer: https://ivrim.co.il/en/films/outsider-freud/

Recommended Readings:

Adam Phillips (2014): Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Yale University Press.

Ernest Jones (1953): The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Basic Books.

Sigmund Freud (1926): The Ego and the Id. Standard Edition, Vol. XIX, Hogarth Press.

Sigmund Freud (1937): Letter from Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte 

Sigmund Freud (1929): Letter to Romain Rolland 

“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 more.” 

Episode Description: We begin by exploring the critical role of case writing in psychoanalytic training, discussing Stephen’s concept of "a fourth pillar of analytic training." Stephen introduces the dynamic interplay between writing and self-reflection, arguing that the act of writing illuminates resistances, countertransference, and areas of growth that might elude the analyst in supervision or personal analysis. He shares his innovative "three-minute chess match" technique for identifying the heart of a case narrative and reflects on his journey—from his mother’s poetry to his current work mentoring candidates in the art of case writing.

We explore Stephen’s insights on the 're-immersion anxiety' that can inhibit case writing, and how addressing these resistances transforms the writing process and deepens clinical work. We conclude with a discussion of how the process of writing fosters an enduring capacity for self-supervision and analytic insight.

Our Guest: Dr. Stephen Bernstein, MD is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and has chaired a discussion group on writing about analytic cases for over 30 years. He is a prolific author, including his recent paper, The Process of Case Writing: A Fourth Pillar of Analytic Training, published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Bernstein’s work highlights the centrality of case writing as an essential tool for self-reflection and professional development. Beyond his focus on writing, he has contributed to the field with early research demonstrating the compatibility of preparatory psychotherapy with psychoanalysis and continues to mentor candidates, fostering their growth as analysts and writers.

Recommended Readings:

• Bernstein, S. (2023). The Process of Case Writing: A Fourth Pillar of Analytic Training. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

• Gabbard, G. O. (2000). Disguise or Consent? Problems and Recommendations Concerning the Publication and Presentation of Clinical Material. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 1071-1086.

• Kantrowitz, J. L. (2004). Writing About Patients: I. Ways of Protecting Confidentiality and Analysts' Conflicts Over Choice of Method. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52, 69-99.

• Stimmel, B. (2013). The Conundrum of Confidentiality. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21(1), 84-106.

• Stein, M. H. (1988). Writing About Psychoanalysis: II. Analysts Who Write, Patients Who Read. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 36, 393-408.

“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 have had outside the realm of religion. The one that pops to mind was what President Biden did about a year after the first onslaught of the Covid epidemic. He had candles put all around the reflecting pool in Washington, one candle for every number of people who had died, and this was broadcast on television.  I sat there and I wept over thousands of deaths, and then I began to think about the power of the experience of mourning with others. Despite the fact that we didn't all lose the same person, we had all lost somebody to this virus that was not as yet being managed. There was something incredibly powerful about that - in the same way for those who lost someone on 9/11 who go down to the Twin Towers and read the list of names every year. But we analysts have not theorized this stuff and I think it's time that we did.” 

Episode Description: We begin with Joyce sharing with us her evolution from being a young analyst who was essentially ever available to her struggling patients to now being "more aware of the problematic edge to a kind of responsiveness that once felt simply necessary."  We discuss what she calls analyst's 'secret delinquencies' - when the clinician intentionally withdraws from the patient into personal matters "so that the analyst becomes the single subject in the room." We consider post-treatment friendships between analyst and analysand and the nature of the evolution of the transference. Joyce shares with us her reflections on growing older and the mixed blessings it provides in terms of greater experience and clinical wisdom as well as a tempting "disengagement from an earlier sense of therapeutic discipline." We close with her suggestion that we consider the "dynamic function of commemorative ritual" not as a mere enactment but as a fulsome experience for "reworking old connections."

Our Guest:Joyce Slochower Ph.D., ABPP, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY; faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Steven Mitchell Center, National Training Program of NIP, Philadelphia Center for Relational Studies & and PINC in San Francisco.  She is the author of Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (1996; & 2014) and Psychoanalytic Collisions (2006 & 2014), and co-Editor, with Lew Aron and Sue Grand, of “De-idealizing relational theory: a Critique from Within” and “Decentering Relational Theory: a Comparative Critique” (2018).  Her new book, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, was released by Routledge in June 2024. She is in private practice in New York City. 

Recommended Readings:

2024 Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken.  NY, London: Routledge. 

2024 Factions are Back. Journal of the American Psychoanal.  Assn., 72(4): 561-582.

2018 Deidealizing Relational Theory: A Critique from Within.  L. Aron, S. Grand, & J. Slochower, Eds. London: Routledge.

2017 Don’t tell anyone.  Psychoanalytic Psychology, 34: 195-200.

2014 Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective (2nd Edition). New York: Routledge.

2014 Psychoanalytic Collisions: (2nd Edition), New York: Routledge. 

"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 never asked about this or that’ and in activating these memories we also experience joy and we have a slow process of integration which is not necessarily about loss but about how continuous this person lives in our mind and that is a little bit the focus of this novel. It's in that sense a portrait of the mind and the process of mourning." 

Episode Description: We begin with recognizing Cordelia's contributions to clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis in addition to her fiction writing. Her latest novel, Memento, has been described as "a journey through the labyrinth of the dream world" and invites the reader into the experiences of ambiguity, timelessness, and the absurd. On a theoretical level, Cordelia introduces the usefulness of the term lethe - the river in the underworld of Hades that causes people to forget their past when they drink from it. We discuss the distinction between libido and lethe and how they manifest themselves in the analytic setting. She emphasizes the importance of understanding aggression not as a stand-alone but as a container of further meaning. We close with her sharing her childhood story of wanting to please her father with her detailed knowledge - a sublimation that she continues to gain pleasure from to this day.

Our Guest: Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, Ph.D.,  is a Training and Supervising Analyst and on the Faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute as well as of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. Her area of expertise is metapsychology, in particular drive theory and its clinical applications. An updated version of her monograph of Freud's metapsychology, Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe, is just being published by International Psychoanalytic Books. Her psychoanalytic books and articles have been published in many languages. She has also published three novels and edited a Freud Reader, an Essay Book, and three collections of Short Stories. She is the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee and works in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Recommended Readings:

Freud, S (1917) Morning and Melancholia. In Freud, S. Standard Edition, Vol IVX,     239 258

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2018) Driven to Survive. Selected Papers Psychoanalysis.      New York: International, Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2020) Memory’s Eyes. A New-York Oedipus Novel. Queens, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2023) Memento. A Novel in Dreams, Thoughts, and Images. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.

Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2024) Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe. A clear road through Freud's metapsychology leading to helpful findings and new concepts. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.

"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 was a generation of artists who were passionately throwing paint at canvases but unable to make art. The relationship between the fundamentals and intuition is very complicated. Nobody seemed to make the point that the great abstract expressionists  were all trained for decades in traditional art schools. That’s what they came out of, and we see this in our analytic colleagues. Many of them are writing wonderfully at the moment, but they were trained as Kleinians or trained as ego psychologists, and they have that in their bone marrow. The kind of representational work with Apple [painting of his dog] that I am talking about when I say: I draw and I draw and I draw until I can put that aside, in analytic work I go to something basic in my training. For me it happens to be something that's close to Paul Gray, it's not where I'm going to stop, but I can use Paul Gray because that's what I was trained in - I will look for transference, I'll look for defense, I'll look for resistance and I'll go back and look for the derivatives of certain affects that are enacted in the relationship. I go over it and over it until I can relinquish it like I did with the painting of Apple, and then the intuitive comes in, but the intuitive is the reward at the end of decades of hard work."

Episode Description: We begin with Jon's mother's encouragement to paint by finding the bird's vitality through "becoming the bird." This leads us to consider the relationship between intuitive seeing and the "images which I might desire to produce." We discuss his notion of the aesthetic matrix which applies both to the analytic encounter as it does to the painter's relationship to his creative process. Jon shares with us his conviction that basic technique, whether artistic or analytic, must first become part of one's inner make-up before intuition can enlighten an obscure moment. He walks us through his creative process in the face of a blank canvas on the wall in front of him. He discusses the different uses of watercolor and oil paint and how their unique properties parallel his spontaneous engagement at various periods of an analysis. He presents a clinical encounter and how he was able to unpack a countertransference impasse through working on a painting. He closes with sharing an experience he had in his native South Africa which leads him to feel that "it's a blessing to be able to work in America."

Linked Paper and Websites:

The Aesthetic Matrix: A Conversation Between a Painter and a Psychoanalyst

"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 interesting about this is not just thinking as a historian and how can I borrow psychoanalytic ideas to enrich the thing I am interested in explaining. Also, because the history of psychoanalysis is bound up with this history. It’s why I cited Fenichel and Loewenstein - the idea of psychoanalysis as this ‘Jewish science’, of the emigrates all persecuted by Nazism and how they restarted their lives in the US or elsewhere, the grappling with the German psychoanalysts after the war, the conflicts in the International Psychoanalytic Association after the war - these are all part of the history of the Holocaust. For me, this combination of the history of psychoanalysis as an endeavor, plus the usefulness of psychoanalytic concepts in trying  to explain this phenomenon in the first place is a hugely enriching conversation.”

Episode Description: We begin with outlining the tension within the 'complemental series' where external events and intrapsychic registration of those events are both contributors to psychic difficulties. This applies to early as well as later life traumas. Dan's book invites us to additionally consider the conflicting psychoanalytic contributions to the question of what enables survival. All research points to the essential dimension of luck in enabling survival in concentration camps. As a historian he fleshes out the contrasting viewpoints of analysts Eddy de Wind and Viktor Frankl as they each describe what they felt were the essential psychological qualities that contributed to survival. De Wind and others point to a state of stupor, also characterized as estrangement or dissociation, as an essential state of mind to facilitate surviving in overwhelming circumstances. He shares with us why he as a historian feels that an analytic way of thinking is essential as "history without psychoanalysis cannot access aspects of the human experience that elude rational thought - and there are sadly many."

Our Guest: Dan Stone, PhD, is Professor of Modern History and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History; Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust; and Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival. He is also the co-editor, with Mark Roseman, of volume I of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust. Dan chaired the academic advisory committee for the Imperial War Museum London’s redesigned Holocaust Galleries (opened in 2021) and is a member of the UK’s Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters.

Recommended Readings:

Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy (eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)

Werner Bohleber, Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2018)

Matt Ffytche and Daniel Pick (eds.), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (London: Routledge, 2016)

Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Emily A. Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2014)

Dori Laub and Andreas Hamburger (eds.), Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony: Unwanted Memories of Social Trauma (London: Routledge, 2017)

Steven A. Luel and Paul Marcus (eds.), Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Holocaust: Selected Essays (New York: Ktav, 1984)

Dan Stone, Psychologists in Auschwitz: Accounting for Survival (lecture at the German Historical Institute,( London, 11 July 2024):