"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 displace their anxiety about what they don't know to the theory, which is at least in principle knowable in order to calm down  their anxiety about the actual interpersonal event that is the thera ..read more

"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 listen with your guts, your emotions, your intellect, and your body, in order to understand what is going on in a particular moment, in a particular session. Then later on you might be able to make sense of ..read more

"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 national and international meetings feel like there is very little room for clinical discussions, and there are just so many clinical discussions that we need to have." Episode Description: Fred's edited bo ..read more

"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 check their devices too often and complained that their parents allow themselves to be distracted by the devices during conversation, something that made a third of them feel unimportant. Many parents too ..read more

"Some of the shared concepts - even words that psychoanalysis and musicians use - such as conflict, ambiguity, silences, dissonance, resolution or not, working through, is in the Mozart you've heard. What you hear in the very opening four measures was worked through this entire sonata, it was thematic. If we play the whole sonata, and even in the first movement, you get a taste of it. Those themes are present throughout the sonata just like in the patient’s associations and interactions with you -  we have music themes and we have core conflicts, and they get developed.”    Epis ..read more

“A child [patient] makes a mistake, upsets things - one doesn't console or complain, but just reflects whatever the patient's affect was at that moment, such as, ‘that seems to bother you’ or ‘it's hard to put those two pieces together’- to just observe it, to not have an affective response of disgust or irritation. The same thing is true if a patient comes in bragging or talking about something that made them very proud - to acknowledge their being proud but to not get all excited. The kind of things that often these children who have a lot of difficulty due to parents’ narcissistic investmen ..read more

“This is the first time that I really felt what is meant by cell relations. You have object relations and you have part-object relations and anxieties that are depressive and schizophrenic. But when I deal with primitive anxieties, I really felt cell relations. What I felt is that my cells were going beyond my skin and I felt that she felt that my cells were going beyond her skin. You have this diffuse transference and when you have this sort of transference it took me to prenatal life and biological life.  Also, I had all those theoretical people like Tustin, Meltzer, and Bion - they wer ..read more

"[in the play Freud's Last Session]... with the sound of the bombers both men react as they did the first time - with fear. But this time instead of disguising it they admit to it. That admittance was the bond between them. Freud also was shaken by the whole experience. At the very end of the play, and repeatedly through the play, there were reports on the BBC about the war. The BBC at that point had a live orchestra, and when the news was finished the orchestra would jump in and play music until the next news bulletin. Every time the news was over, Freud immediately turned it off, so he didn ..read more

"I feel as a psychoanalyst one has to respond to the world. We can’t just simply remain in our consulting rooms although that has always been vitally important for my identity and thinking. We can’t turn a blind eye to what is going on in the world. There are a lot of awful things going on - a lot of genocides, a lot of similar kinds of processes that were seen in the Holocaust, that were seen in slavery, and they are continuing. We need to stand up, we need to say what’s going on, we need to tell people ‘Look, these are the elements.’ In America they came close to disaster with what happened ..read more

"Psychoanalysis is a translation of what I call in Spanish, Psicoanalisis Criollo, which means that we are hybrid cultures in Latin America, and that is something that we should never forget. We have been acting in the Psychoanalytical Society for so long as if we were living in some big modern city of the first world, like London, Paris, San Francisco, New York.  I think that this ignoring or even denial of the fact that we are not there, we live in societies which are in many ways different than societies from the first world and we have to take that into account."     Ep ..read more