Connections and Conversation is a free monthly Zoom meeting, cultivating creativity and freedom of thought and feeling. We invite you to engage with our presenters and community as they share their interests and passions in conversation on current topics in psychoanalysis.

This free event that alternates times. The meeting often begins with a 45 minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of conversation. When an event is recorded you can access the recording at the vault.

This series is open to all.

In case of questions please contact: [email protected]

In this paper, I use my autobiographical experience of living in Moscow as a child to highlight fundamental dilemmas that human beings face most especially in the aftermath of experiencing significant disillusionment and suffering: ‘Is it better to love and lose or not to love so much? “Is it better to hope passionately and endure the risk of significant disappointment or is it better not to hope so fervently? Specifically, I describe how in the aftermath of my own traumatic experience, I detached from what I loved in order to dilute the pain of losing. Yet this attempt to dissociate from the risk of loving backfired I also detached from the passionate life force I needed to fulfill my life. I then more generally describe how through an individual’s attempt to cover up his vulnerabilities by forming a self-enclosed relationship with himself, a person can become trapped in an enclosed prison of isolation that prevents him from ‘seizing the vital moment’ of the one life he has at his disposal. I then speak of how the importance of how the jargon-free openness of a dialogical relationship in psychotherapy with the therapist as “participatory witness” to the patient’s lonely suffering is an important prelude to the process of mourning. Such mourning ultimately entails the replacement of self-shaming with self-acceptance of oneself as an individual.