Book Announcement by Ofra Eshel (Israel)

Eshel, O. (2026). Reinventing psychoanalysis for the great unknown: The never-ending challenge. Routledge.

Ofra Eshel’s new book explores extreme experiences in psychoanalysis and examines how to work with and understand such experiences both theoretically and practically. The text grew out of a 2025 two-day conference in Los Angeles dedicated to her work. Together with an international panel of distinguished discussants, Eshel here ventures into the great unknown of psychoanalysis – from massively traumatic states and enigmatic telepathic dreams to the sudden, shattering death of a patient.

Reinventing Psychoanalysis for the Great Unknown: The Never-Ending Challenge (Routledge) invites readers into new, transformative quantum frontiers of psychoanalytic thought and clinical experience. Moving beyond classical psychoanalysis and its epistemological boundaries, Eshel charts, both clinically and theoretically, an ontological–experiential dimension of analytic work grounded in radical presence and deep, transformative patient–analyst oneness, making possible encounters with extreme analytic experiences and the most seemingly unreachable patients.

Inspired by Winnicott and Bion yet reaching beyond them, these contributions open both mind and heart to the traumatic, the catastrophic, and the unknowable, offering a pathway to analysts and therapists seeking to extend the reach of psychoanalytic treatment in order to work with some of the most difficult of clinical situations.

www.routledge.com/Reinventing-Psychoanalysis-for-the-Great-Unknown

O Emergir da Unicidade Analítica: No Coração da Psicanálise (The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis)

Eshel, O. (2025). O emergir da unicidade analítica: No coração da psicanálise. Tradução de Marina Vidal Stabile e revisão de João Carlos Braga. Editora Blucher.

This is a Brazilian-Portuguese translation of Eshel’s 2019 book, The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis, a profound and penetrating exploration of a fundamental dimension of analytic presence and patient–analyst interconnectedness that offers new possibilities for extending the reach of psychoanalytic treatment and working with some of the most difficult treatment situations.

Eshel listens with a “hearing heart” and gives herself over to being within the patient’s experiential world and the grip of the unfolding analytic process. She has gone with her patients into black holes, dissociation, deadness, sleepiness, petrifaction, silence, longings, the depths of perversion, and the enigmas of telepathic dreams, while experiencing the emergence of patient–analyst two-in-oneness, with its challenges and mysteries.

Drawing on Winnicott’s posthumous writings and Bion’s late work and going beyond recent analytic notions of intersubjectivity and witnessing to interconnectedness and “withnessing,” Eshel offers her own understanding of at-one-ment or “being-in-oneness” with the patient’s emotional reality as the only state of analytic being that can meet and transform core unthinkable breakdown and mental catastrophe. The critical question here is to what extent the analyst is willing and able to open the boundaries of his or her psyche to the patient, especially in difficult, unbearable and devastated-devastating states. Eshel’s clinical narratives are detailed, intense, theoretically grounded, and moving, invaluable guides for those who want to extend their reach into deeper levels of disturbance in the difficult clinical work they do.

www.blucher.com.br/o-emergir-da-unicidade-analitica

Ofra Eshel, Psy.D. is training/supervising analyst and senior faculty member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and an IPA Fellow. She is an Honorary Member of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP), Los Angeles, and former Vice-President of the International Winnicott Association (IWA). She founded and heads advanced psychoanalytic programs at Tel Aviv University and Deepsprings, Beijing, China. She co-edited Was It or Was It Not? When Shadows of Sexual Abuse Emerge in Psychoanalytic Treatment (2017) and authored The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2019), translated into Chinese and Brazilian-Portuguese, with Hebrew, Spanish and Russian translations in progress.

Ofra Eshel, Psy.D.
Tel Aviv, Israel
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