A beautiful book. A dialogical exploration of the human condition drawing on science, philosophy, psychology, poetry, art, spirituality which is to say, open, un-dogmatic, and resourceful. One feels appreciation of lifes depths and surfaces, ones own life and life of the Other. The writing is down to earth, personal and accessible, drawing on a rich background of human struggle, backslides and growth. We are born all life long and the Work of the Other furthers contact with the Work of Being.
Michael Eigen, author of The Challenge of Being Human, The Sensitive Self, The Psychoanalytic Mystic, and Contact with the Depths.
This book is an intriguing journey in search of our basic experience of otherness in its various manifestations. There is a beautiful variance of voices that come together in a space of mutual enhancement. The concepts of dialogue and of trueness are dealt with in a unique fashion, in which the writers actively follow each other in the here and now. They thus inspire a hope that we as therapists and as human beings can rediscover our natural urge and curiosity for relations, for opening to the unknown, for co-creating.
Ofra Eshel, faculty, training and supervising analyst, Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and honorary member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; author of The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis
We can no more change our heartfelt commitments by talking to ourselves, than by defensively reiterating them in divisive dispute. But conversing with trusted others can. Glimpsing ourselves reflected in their caring eyes, enables the kind of potentially transformative self- distancing we can never achieve alone. Relational Conversations explores this epitome of relational psychology with uncanny insight, first by taking the psychotherapeutic dialogical interaction between analyst and patient as paradigmatic of true otherness, and by reflecting on it in a series of truly transformative non-Socratic dialogues.
Menachem Fisch, professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science, director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University, and author of The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism; Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency; Dialogues of Reason: Science, Politics, Religion, and other books
