The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis - Paperback

by Ofra Eshel (Author)

The Emergence of Analytic Oneness is a profound and penetrating exploration of a fundamental dimension of analytic presence and patient-analyst interconnectedness that offers new possibilities for extending the reach of psychoanalytic treatment and working with some of the most difficult treatment situations.

Eshel listens with a 'hearing heart' and gives herself over to being within the patient's experiential world and the grip of the unfolding analytic process. She has gone with her patients into black holes, dissociation, deadness, sleepiness, petrifaction, silence, longings, the depths of perversion, and the enigmas of telepathic dreams, while experiencing the emergence of patient-analyst two-in-oneness, with its challenges and mysteries. Drawing on Winnicott's posthumous writings and Bion's late work and going beyond recent analytic notions of intersubjectivity and witnessing to interconnectedness and 'withnessing, ' Eshel offers her own understanding of at-one-ment or "being-in-oneness" with the patient's emotional reality as the only state of analytic being that can meet and transform core unthinkable breakdown and mental catastrophe. The critical question here is to what extent the analyst is willing and able to open the boundaries of his or her psyche to the patient, especially in difficult, unbearable and devastated-devastating states.

Eshel's clinical narratives are detailed, intense, theoretically grounded, and very moving. The Emergence of Analytic Oneness will be an invaluable guide for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and students in these fields who want to extend their reach into deeper levels of disturbance in the difficult clinical work they do.

Author Biography

Ofra Eshel is a faculty member, training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA); vice-president of the International Winnicott Association (IWA); founder and head of the postgraduate track "Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs" at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. Her papers have been published in psychoanalytic journals and books and presented in national and international conferences all over the world. She is in private practice in Tel Aviv, Israel.