How well do you know the people in the therapy room?
To the outside observer, Dr. Ella Ziv is living a perfect life. She is a respectable psychologist, professor, and mother of two adorable young daughters. What's more, she has made her career helping others overcome their inner demons. Fear. Abandonment. Solitude.
Demons Ella knows all too well. Demons she ran from all her life.
“Hello Ella. I’m dying to see your face right now.”
When she receives the first letter from Itamar, a former patient who disappeared over a year ago, Ella doesn't think much of it. But as their correspondence ensues, and Itamar’s letters take on a more violent nature, their renewed connection threatens to upend the perfectly manicured world Ella worked so hard to build. Thousands of miles apart, both patient and doctor are swept into a story that blurs the line between them. As their lives fray at the seams with each letter, it becomes clear that nothing in their relationship was as carefully set as it was in Ella’s clinic… and that obsession could be a two-way street.
A bold, suspenseful, and entirely unputdownable narrative told entirely through Itamar and Ella’s letters, Since I Saw You Last raises questions about the delicate nature of therapy, the power we draw from others, and the heavy burdens of secrets—especially those we keep from ourselves.
"An engrossing, addictive novel of letters, the reading of which is in itself a roller coaster of identifications, and which manages at the same time to touch deeply on the essence of the analytical relationship and to exceed all its rules and boundaries."
Prof. Dana Amir, a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst, poetess and literature researcher
"This book teaches us more about the intensity of the love-hate dynamics that exist between patient and analyst than any journal article on the subject."
Danielle Knafo, professor, psychoanalyst, author
A translation of my story, Sigmund Freud Slept Here, was published at the Short Story Project.
Prof. Merav Roth was kind enough to write:
"In the wake of a breakup, the protagonist marks her fortieth birthday by embarking on a journey that retraces Freud’s footsteps. What begins as a concrete voyage soon dissolves into a hallucinatory experience, where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur. Within this liminal space, Freud and the protagonist form an intimate therapeutic bond, engaging in conversations about her childhood, love, desire, greed, and even the experience of aging and slowing down.
Orna Reuven’s short story is a first-rate Freudian delight – Oedipal, sensual, and emotionally charged, yet also melancholic, profound, and deeply moving. It may even offer readers a quiet liberation from certain unnecessary constraints."
This paper explored the effect of meta-cognitive manipulation, on the difficulty to suppress repetitive behaviors. Participants were asked to suppress scratching, while working on a questionnaire that presented scratching-related situations. Some participants received a meta-cognitive conceptualization of potential difficulty in executing the suppression task; they were either told that suppressing scratching is quite easy for everybody or told that suppressing scratching is very difficult for everybody. We reasoned that participants would use the meta-cognitive conceptualization to infer their own motivation: those who received the "easy for everybody" instructions would consider their suppression failures to be indicative of their motivation to scratch, and therefore would scratch more. Conversely, participants who received the "difficult for everybody" instructions would consider their suppression failures as natural and non-informative, and consequently would be less motivated to scratch. Results are discussed in a broad therapeutic framework, addressing the importance of interpretations that highlight the natural uncontrollability of the inner world, indicating that control failures are expected and nonindicative. Could this be the reason psychodynamic treatment tends to obtain smaller effects with OCD patients? Afterall, psychodynamic understanding promotes the opposite idea, that difficulty to suppress thoughts and behaviors has a deep motivational explanation that should be revealed.
This paper presents the main findings of my Ph.D. dissertation and discusses their application to the treatment of OCD. We explored the central role of control in OCD using an illusion-of-control paradigm and showed that OCD symptoms were correlated with both higher illusory sense of control, and with more repetitive behavioral control attempts. We then conceptualized the dynamics between illusory sense of control and compulsive rituals, suggesting that compulsions serve to deduce control levels by proxy. This happens as the temporary, yet much-desired illusion of control derived from compulsions, becomes a general indicator of control. But what would happen in therapy, if we could address proxies for what they are, and dare think of the true uncontrollability they are hiding?
This paper implemented an experimental methodology that explores the relations between morality and physical cleansing, to participants with OCD and matched controls. All participants wrote about an immoral deed they had committed, after which half of the participants in each group cleaned their hands with a wipe. All participants were then offered an opportunity to help a fictitious graduate student by taking part in her experiment. Replicating previous findings, physical cleaning reduced the willingness to help and relieved moral emotions, but this effect was particularly prominent among participants with OCD. We discuss two processes that may account for the association between morality and cleanliness in general and particularly in the context of OCD: embodiment of morality in terms of physical cleanliness and assigning abstract meaning to the physical actions of cleaning.
This paper aimed to compare five principal measures for assessing insight in OCD and to investigate the relationships between insight and central demographic and clinical variables. The most robust correlation was between insight and current medical treatment, so that medicated participants showed higher insight levels on most insight measures compared to non-medicated participants.