Ellen Pinsky, PsyD, a BPSI faculty member, was recently interviewed by Tracy Morgan, psychoanalyst and founding editor of the webcast, New Books in Psychoanalysis, about her recent book Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts (Routledge, 2017). Follow this link to listen to the interview (the audio player also appears at the bottom of this page).
Below is a small excerpt from Tracy Morgan’s introductory remarks:
“If I could vote for my favorite new psychoanalytic book of the 21st century, Ellen Pinsky’s Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts (Routledge, 2017) might be it; however to be clear, this is actually a set of essays that is decidedly not a collection of psychoanalytic articles. With great pleasure I am happy to report that it is full of style.
Pinsky sets out to explore the field’s overall silence regarding two seemingly unrelated topics: the analyst’s mortality and sexual transgressions in the consulting room. The strategy behind yoking these topics together is revealed as the author essentially asks, among other questions, what happens to the patient when the analysis is brought to a sudden end, by death or violation of the frame?
The field’s turning of a blind eye to these two conceptually interrelated “events” is rooted in a refusal to wrestle with the demands of analytic work and the analyst’s human fallibility. (I could make an argument that this is also largely a book about men in the field but that would be a separate essay. Be sure to not miss her description of Owen Renik’s writing on what constitutes analytic work!)”
