Practitioners and General Public: $40  |  Students: Free

In this presentation, Eshel delineates a fundamental dimension of analytic work created by the analyst’s “presencing” (being there) within the patient’s experiential world and the ensuing patient-analyst states of oneness, an interconnectedness or “withnessing” that may deepen into “at-one-ment” with the patient’s innermost emotional reality.  Drawing on the radical late writings of Winnicott and Bion, she illustrates how this emerging dimension, with its profound ontological-experiential implications, can  extend the reach of psychoanalytic treatment to more disturbed patients and the more deeply disturbed aspects of patients’ personalities.  Two clinical examples illustrate the genesis of a new experience brought about by the analyst’s “presencing” and the emerging patient-analyst “at-one-ment” within the realm of devastating emotional catastrophe.

Ofra Eshel, PsyD, is a training and supervising analyst and faculty member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and former vice-president of the International Winnicott Association (IWA).  She is founder and head of the postgraduate track “Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” at the Program of Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University.  Her papers have been published in psychoanalytic journals and book chapters, translated into five languages, and presented at national and international conferences.  She has taught and lectured and psychoanalytic institutes and universities around the world.  She was awarded the 2013 Frances Tustin International Memorial Prize, the 2017 Symonds Prize, and the 2022 Leonard J. Comess Award.  She is the co-editor of Was It or Was It Not? When Shadows of Sexual Abuse Emerge in Psychoanalytic Treatment (Carmel, 2017), and author of The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019).  She is in private practice in Tel Aviv.