The Generative Power of Living Through Death in States of At-Onement (Online Presentation)

2 CE Credits for Psychoanalysts,Psychologists, and Social Workers

Working within a Winnicottian model of deep mutual regression, Ofra Eshel describes reaching back emotionally to a moment of early traumatic breakdown when the patient psychically confronted extinction.  Drawing on Bion’s concept of “transformation in O,” she becomes her patient’s psychic reality, living through the patient’s catastrophic experience of annihilation while remaining alive.  Through the state of at-onement with the analyst, the patient rises Lazarus-like, reclaiming life from psychic death.  Living through the patient’s experience of psychic death has generative potential and risks for both analyst and patient.

Ofra Eshel, PsyD, FIPA, is a clinical psychologist and training and supervising analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.  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. She coedited Was It or Was It Not? When Shadows of Sexual Abuse Emerge in Psychoanalytic Treatment (2017) and authored The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019) and the forthcoming Reinventing Psychoanalysis for the Great Unknown: The Never-Ending Challenge (Routledge, 2026).

Dan Gilhooley, PsyaD, discussant, 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. 

Practitioners and General Public: $50
Students: Free

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