Come Closer

'A masterwork by one of the great thinkers of our time.' - Dani Shapiro

'A deliriously smart and empathetic book that makes a match between the way you love and the way you were loved: sparks ensue.' - Joshua Cohen

What keeps us from having the relationships we want?
Why can’t we find the right partner?
Why do we repeat the same painful patterns?
How can we keep love alive?

The children we once were live inside us, and our early relationships are the templates for our later emotional and sexual attractions. Although they try to protect us, they are also the source of our relational struggles, awakening our fears and longings, and constructing our love life, often without our permission.

Diving deep into patients’ intimate lives, as well as her own, here psychoanalyst Dr Galit Atlas exposes our most private desires, unmet needs, yearnings and pain. Through her intricate portrayal of lives as complex as our own, we uncover the frightened child, the melancholic child, the ashamed child, the invisible child and the guilty child. From our fear of loss and rejection, to our capacity for healthy boundaries, we are gifted a nuanced understanding of the link between our inner wounds and our adult love. By inviting our childhood selves to have a seat at the table, we learn to work through our past instead of playing it out in our relationships.

This therapeutic journey is an emotional, multi-dimensional understanding of intimacy, offering a transformative path to healing.

Dr Galit Atlas is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst recognised for her rethinking of the place of sexuality and desire in contemporary theory and practice.

A leader in the field of relational psychoanalysis, she is on the faculty of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, where she teaches the popular clinical seminar on sexuality.

Dr Atlas has been a keynote speaker for major psychoanalytic conferences such as the International Psychoanalytic Association conference in London (IPA), the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis (IARPP), the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and more.