Patient–Analyst Interconnectedness: Personal Notes on Close Encounters of a New Dimension

Abstract

It is impossible to write about my personal development as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in Israel without relating to the powerful impact of the fate of the Jewish people on my family's history and therefore on mine. It is a history interwoven with narratives of loss and survival.My father was born in Poland, in the vicinity of Warsaw, to a wealthy family. When World War I reached that area, everybody ran for their lives, but my grandfather refused to abandon his lands and possessions. It was not until the very last moment that he decided to flee with his family, leaving his great wealth behind. My grandparents and their five small children made their way to Israel (then Palestine) with the money that my grandfather had managed to take with him, and mainly with the money obtained along the way from selling the jewelry my grandmother had received as a beautiful young bride and wife in this wealthy family. Years later, in my childhood, my grandmother, although a widow of many years, was still mourning the loss of her jewelry that had been sold, and particularly a dearly loved pair of diamond earrings, which had been taken from her and sold for passage on the ship to Israel. When the family finally arrived in Israel, my grandfather again bought up large tracts of land to cultivate. One day, he discovered Arab shepherds and their flocks trespassing on his fields; running towards them shouting, he had a heart attack and died on the spot. My grandmother remained a young widow with five children, and my father, the first son after two daughters, had to drop out of school and go to work in order to help support the family. The story of my mother's family was far more traumatic. Born in Latvia, then part of Poland, into an intellectual, Zionistic family, she was the only girl among four brothers. Her father was the headmaster of the Jewish school and the local Hebrew teacher. Her eldest brother immigrated to Israel as a pioneer on a kibbutz, and she was sent to join him because she was often ill with the flu and her doctor had recommended a sunny climate. This saved her from the brutal Nazi massacre of the rest of her family and the entire Jewish population in that region. Only my mother and her brother in Israel had survived the Holocaust, but not for long. My mother moved to Tel Aviv, worked hard to earn a living, and studied in a teacher's seminar. She then met my father and they married. Her brother remained on the kibbutz. He was an intellectually brilliant but sad person, overwhelmed by the loss of his entire family, lonely in the intense socializing of the kibbutz. He worked hard all day long planting and developing the kibbutz's orchard, and at night he read and

Psychoanalysis and Telepathic Processes

“…Also in France, the 1983 publication of Granoff and Rey’s L’occulte, objet de la pensée freudienne (The Occult: Object of Freudian Thought) marked a renewal in psychoanalytic explorations of telepathy (see, e.g., Barbier and Decourt 1998; Bernat 2001). The last two decades have shown a growing interest concerning this topic, with papers published in many psychoanalytic journals (Brottman 2011; de Peyer 2014, 2016; Eshel 2006, 2010, 2012, 2019; Mayer 2001, 2007; Papazian 2017; Reichbart 2018; Rosenbaum 2011; Sánchez-Medina 2018; Totton 2003, 2007). Notable here is a paper by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer (2001), which included the posthumous publication of an article by Robert Stoller concerning telepathy.…”

“…A question that concerns both historical and contemporary publications on telepathy is its conditions of emergence (de Peyer 2016; Eshel 2010; Farber 2017; Rottenberg 2017; Sánchez-Medina 2018). Why and how do seemingly telepathic occurrences emerge in the psychoanalytic setting?…”

“…The reactions of the analyst to such experiences—and the feeling of intrusion they may provoke—will participate in the transformation of transpsychic acts into interpsychic exchanges and finally into intrapsychic processes in the analyst. Eshel (2010) has referred to the notions of “twogetherness” and “withness” to describe “a process whereby patient and analyst become an emergent two-in-one new entity that is fundamentally inseparable into its two participants: an entity (unit or being) of interconnectedness” (p. 152). Similarly, Brottman (2011) has pointed to moments of deep connection between analyst and analysand that “challenge ordinary assumptions about what we are capable of knowing and perceiving about each other” (p. 112).…”

From Extension to Revolutionary Change in Clinical Psychoanalysis: The Radical Influence of Bion and Winnicott

“…In the many years that have passed since I treated Nir, I have come to realize that transformation in the most cut‐off, blocked, deadening, empty, desperate, and despairing psychic zones—zones of psychic breakdown, madness, annihilation, and catastrophe—may become possible only when the analyst/therapist is willing and able to be‐within (and with‐in ) the patient's experiential world and within the grip of the analytic process, with the ensuing patient‐analyst deep‐level interconnectedness or “witnessing” psyche‐with‐psyche (Eshel , , , , , , , ). This interconnectedness, which becomes at‐one‐ment when the analyst puts him‐/herself entirely within the patient's emotional reality, is difficult and demanding, an unyielding, ongoing struggle with the underlying catastrophe to reach a new and formative, deep experiencing, beyond epistemological exploration‐K.…”

“…In modern physics, different paradigms—classical physics and quantum mechanics—do coexist (Kuhn ). Whereas classical physics is based on assumptions of linear causality, determinism, and a sharp separation between observer and observed, quantum mechanics introduced into scientific thinking enigmatic principles of uncertainty and inseparability of observer and observed, the crucial formative effect of the process of observation, and the fundamental organization of unbroken wholeness that underlies our perceived world of separateness at the particle level (Bohm ; Botella and Botella ; Eshel , , , , , ; Field ; Godwin ; Kulka ; Mayer ; Sucharov ; Suchet ).…”