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The Israeli psychoanalyst Ofra Eshel will be familiar to some readers of this journal having published several papers here from 1998 onwards. In her book The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis, the reader is invited to accompany her on an intricate and compelling journey.
Reading Eshel is challenging and thought-provoking. She offers deeply personal descriptions of clinical experiences, including with extremely troubled patients, as well concise theoretical explorations culminating in a broadly sketched proposal for a paradigm shift in psychoanalytic theory and technique.
Eshel's primary inspirations are Donald Winnicott and the later work of W. R. Bion. One of the positive outcomes of Eshel's project is to put Winnicott and Bion into a kind of conversation. She sees them as instigators of an evolving direction that psychoanalysis is not only moving toward but, in her opinion, must also deepen into and embrace to cope with the clinical challenges of our present times.
I found the series of chapters in this book demanding in several ways. First, the clinical stories evoke intense suffering. Eshel describes how the patient suffers, how the analyst must come to suffer, and so the reader must risk suffering too. That is perhaps a necessary inevitability because Eshel, first and foremost, wants to describe experience.
If the reader stays at the level of theory, many thoughts and even controversies will be stimulated. However, if the reader allows their imagination to enter the details of the patient's distress and of the analyst's attempts to be present and to communicate under intimidating circumstances, another level of appreciation begins to dawn. In this way, Eshel is vulnerable
to her reader in a similar way that her patient is vulnerable to her. How deeply can the analyst contact, imagine and experience the idiosyncratic and intimidating suffering of the patient? How generously can the reader grant their attention and openly seek to comp