Teaching and Lectures – ד"ר אורנה ראובן

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Online Book Launch of Catastrophic Grief, Trauma and Resilience in child concentration camp survivors: A retrospective view of their holocaust experiences (Academic Studies Press, 2023). I will be honored to share with its remarkable authors: Tracey Farber, Gillian Eagle and Cora Smith, a psychoanalytic perspective of their book.

Monday 11 September 2023, 20:00 – 21:30 Israel time.

Reading these beautiful passages brought a surge of memories of my first experiences as a witness to the whiteness. I Grew up in Israel in the 70’s; when I was born, 10 years have already passed since the Eichmann’ trial. The Yom-Kippur War took everyone by surprise, just a few days before my second birthday. Then everything seemed broken again, I could feel. I loved sleeping over at my grandmother’s. I held her hand as she softly sang me lullabies in Yiddish. Some of the tunes made us both tearful, but she didn’t say much, just told me her mother’s name, which I eventually gave to my daughter. On some Saturday mornings, I went with my mother to visit a beautiful woman who had a blue number tattooed on her wrist. The beautiful woman lived among an abundance of glass vases and silver platters and flowery porcelain vessels, but I knew I shouldn’t touch or make noise, as something horrible was hovering over her darkened apartment. In elementary school we all read a collection of short stories about the Jewish holidays. Yom HaShoah had a story as well. Something about potato peels, that fed a whole family in hiding. My grandmother never threw peels of any sort, and in her orderly kitchen, a small mysterious door at the higher end of the wall, concealed the perfect hiding place. I think I was 11, when the whole school sat on the dirty gymnasium floor, where a man overdressed in a suit, told us his Holocaust story. I listened carefully. The words revealed an unimaginable truth. They merged with what I vaguely knew of my grandparents’ past, of the beautiful woman with the blue number, creating a mixture of too-much and too-little. Then every year, just after Pesach vacation was over, as the days became long and hot, holocaust survivors came to school to talk to us. It took years to clarify the emotional meaning and impact of these meetings, which eventually led me to write.

A Prepared Mind for Analytical Mistakes

The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) International Conference, June 2019

"In the fields of observation chance favors only the mind which is prepared" (Louis Pasteur, 1854).

In this lecture, I discuss reasons for which we ought not to let our analytical mistakes be silenced. Rather, I call attention to our mistakes as opportunities to lay a foundation for a lively mutual exploration. This lecture revisits Freud's most tormenting analytic failure –Dora, and then considers theoretical developments that promote working through our mistakes in an open minded and transparent fashion.

The intriguing idea that for a scientific mistake to become an invention, it must be met by a prepared mind which holds enough knowledge and experience to allow it to sense the hidden opportunity, is demonstrated in the psychoanalytic sphere. Could it be that Freud gave us Dora’s analysis as a brave scientist, allowing his failure to become a point of shared curiosity? Through it we learn that in many cases, being trapped in the analytic relationship precedes our understanding. We then agree to play along, keep observing, keep imagining, until out of the clinical material a truthful account of the shared experience arises.

Conference Site <