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.

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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 <