Relational Conversations on Meeting and Becoming: The Birth of a True Other

Demonstrating a relational, dialogic way of thinking and writing, this book offers an innovative perspective on the human potential for intersubjective engagement and on the nature of true encounter.

The authors engage in creative, associative dialogues and trialogues inspired by psychoanalysis and Buddhism, poetry and religion, theory and case studies, academic and free styles of writing – each enriching the other. Reflecting on the essence of relating, they convey a flow between inner, private reveries and shared ones, and between individual expressions of thought and evolvements of newly born thirds. Through this interdisciplinary, experimental setting, the authors explore the possibility to reach truths and meanings that each individual would not have achieved on their own.

Offering new concepts and formulations that may nourish psychotherapists’ thought and be usefully implemented in their practice, this book presents a pressingly unique and essential viewpoint for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice.

Michal Barnea-Astrog is a senior Hakomi trainer and author of Carved by Experience (Karnac, 2017), Psychoanalytic and Buddhist Reflections on Gentleness (Routledge, 2019), and the novels Migration (Pardess, 2021) and The Coming Years (Shta’yim, in press).

Mitchel Becker is a clinical psychologist in private practice, lecturer at the Psychotherapy Programs of Bar Ilan University, and supervisor at the Psychotherapy Program of Tel Aviv University.