Save The Date: Annual Conference: Being-with Nothingness

Ofra Eshel, Analytic Oneness, And Modern Psychoanalysis

Keynote Speaker: Ofra Eshel, PsyD
Discussants: Aner Govrin, PhD and Dan Gilhooley, PsyaD

This will be a hybrid conference
(limited in-person seating and online via Zoom)

Conference Location:

Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, 16 West 10 th Street, New York City

Drawing on the work of Winnicott and Bion, Ofra Eshel has developed a clinical method of “becoming her patient.” Eshel will present a case that demonstrates how she immersed herself in her patient’s subjective experience, fostering a shared regression to the origins of the patient’s psychic organization. Moving from interpretation to creating a state of “at-onement” or “shared mind,” she and her patient “lived-through-together” the crippling annihilative experiences of her patient’s past, resulting in psychic transformation.

There is a striking similarity between the work of Hyman Spotnitz, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, and Eshel. In the 1960s, Spotnitz developed a therapeutic model that avoided interpretation, emphasizing mutual regression to the origins of the patient’s ego in the first weeks and months of life. Through a process of mirroring, Spotnitz worked to “become his patient,” creating a state of “shared mind” from which he sought to rebuild his patient’s fractured ego. Believing overwhelming, destructive aggression experienced in early life to be the cause of psychosis, Spotnitz emphasized emotionally based repatterning of destructive impulses as the basis of psychic restoration.

This conference explores facets of analytic oneness in the therapeutic encounter, specifically
“living-through nothingness” and telepathy.

Ofra Eshel, PsyD, FIPA, is a clinical psychologist and senior faculty, training, and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Honorary Member, New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles.   She founded and heads the postgraduate track “Winnicott, Bion, and Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” at the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, and the advanced program “Radical Breakthroughs in Contemporary Psychoanalysis” at Deepsprings, Beijing, China.  She has been the recipient of several honors and awards. She coedited Was It or Was It Not? When Shadows of Sexual Abuse Emerge in Psychoanalytic Treatment (2017). She authored The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019) with translations into Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Hebrew; and Reinventing Psychoanalysis for the Great Unknown: The Never-Ending Challenge (Routledge, 2026). 

Aner Govrin, PhD, is an associate professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where he serves as director of the Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics doctoral program at The Program for Hermeneutics and Culture.  He is a clinical psychologist, philosopher, and training psychoanalyst at Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), his research focuses on the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis.  His work spans several domains: he studies psychoanalytic writing and provides guidance to clinicians on writing case studies for training examinations and publications.  He has also developed a new psychological theory of moral judgment.  His books include Ethics and Attachment: How We Make Moral Judgements (2018), Conservative and Radical Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Knowledge: The Fascinated and the Disenchanted (2018), Conversations with Michael Eigen (co-authored with Michael Eigen, 2007), How Philosophy Changed Psychoanalysis: From Naïve Realism to Postmodernism (2025), and The Craft of Psychodynamic Case Study: A Practical Guide (2026).

Dan Gilhooley, PsyaD, is a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies.  He has published on the topics of psychoanalytic process research, intersubjectivity, creative imagination, and exceptional experience.  His book, written with Frank Toich, Psychoanalysis, Intersubjective Writing, and a Postmaterialist Model of Mind: I Woke Up Dead (Routledge, 2020), received the Gradiva Award for Best Psychoanalytic Book. He is in private practice in Bellport, New York.