Reinventing Psychoanalysis for the Great Unknown The Never-Ending Challenge

Part I: Reinventing psychoanalysis for the great traumatic unknown 1. Being Totally in the dark: On working analytically within the depths of the great unknown of psychic catastrophe  2.  Into the wilderness with Ofra Eshel and her patient Clari  3.  Fascinated and troubled in contemporary psychoanalysis: Ofra Eshel’s extension of the Bion-Winnicott framework for working with severe traumatic states  Part II: The enigma of telepathic dreams  4. Where are you, my beloved? On absence, loss, and the enigma of telepathic dreams  5. “To approach what is radically other”: Ofra’s Eshel’s “Where are you, my beloved?”  Part III: Reinventing psychanalysis for severe perversion  6. Calamities and secrets, the power of the fetish: Clinical case  7. Delving into the never-ending challenge of reinventing psychanalysis for severe perversion  8. Bearing the Unbearable—in reply

Biography

Ofra Eshel is faculty and training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, and a fellow of the IPA. She is an honorary member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She founded and heads the post-graduate track “Winnicott, Bion, and Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthrough” at Tel Aviv University, and also (in 2024) the advanced program “Radical Breakthroughs in Contemporary Psychoanalysis” in Beijing, China. Her book, The Emergence of Analytic Oneness (Routledge, 2019), has been translated into Chinese, Brazilian-Portuguese, and Hebrew, with Spanish and Russian translations in progress.

'Ofra Eshel’s Reinventing Psychoanalysis for the Great Unknown: The Never-Ending Challenge is a magnificent tribute to her work in which she reinvents psychoanalysis in a form that is suited to treating severe traumatic states and other forms of psychic difficulty previously unreachable. She delves deeply into her experience with the patient to accompany him or her through the depths of darkness in which the patient has lived alone and consequently without the possibility of continuing the journey into becoming oneself. This is an invaluable book that marks the frontier of contemporary psychoanalysis.'

Thomas Ogden, author of What Alive Means and Coming to Life in the Consulting Room

 

'In this remarkable new volume, Ofra Eshel deepens and expands her groundbreaking original ideas on analytic oneness, exploring its vital role in psychoanalytic work at the deepest levels of the mind. With illuminating commentaries by distinguished psychoanalytic thinkers, the book ventures courageously into the unknown frontiers of analytic experience—where challenge, mystery, and transformation intertwine. Eshel’s notion of “quantum interconnectedness” opens a visionary path, suggesting that psychoanalysis, like quantum physics, can transcend the boundaries of conventional science. Her striking clinical illustrations exemplify her rare capacity to think, feel, and write from within the very heart of psychoanalysis.'

João Carlos Braga MD, PhD, training and supervising analyst, the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo, and Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Curitiba, Brazil.