The subject of dream telepathy (especially patients' telepathic dreams) and related phenomena in the psychoanalytic context has been a controversial, disturbing 'foreign body' ever since it was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1921. Telepathy- suffering (or intense feeling) at a distance (Greek: pathos + tele)-is the transfer or communication of thoughts, impressions and information over distance between two people without the normal operation of the recognized sense organs. The author offers a comprehensive historical review of the psychoanalytic literature on this controversial issue, beginning with Freud's years-long struggles over the possibility of thoughttransference and dream telepathy. She then describes her own analytic encounter over the years with five patients' telepathic dreams-dreams involving precise details of the time, place, sensory impressions, and experiential states that the analyst was in at that time, which the patients could not have known through ordinary sensory perception and communication. The author's ensuing explanation combines contributory factors involving patient, archaic communication and analyst. Each of these patients, in early childhood, had a mother who was emotionally absent-within-absence, due to the absence of a significant figure in her own life. This primary traumatic loss was imprinted in their nascent selves and inchoate relating to others, with a fixation on a nonverbal, archaic mode of communication. The patient's telepathic dream is formed as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent, in order to find the analyst and thus halt the process of abandonment and prevent collapse into the despair of the early traumatization. Hence, the telepathic dream embodies an enigmatic 'impossible' extreme of patient-analyst deep-level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process. This paper is part of the author's endeavour to grasp the true experiential scope and therapeutic significance of this dimension of fundamental patient-analyst interconnectedness.

This paper focuses on the analyst's "presencing" (being there) within the patient's experiential world and within the grip of the psychoanalytic process, and the ensuing deep patient-analyst interconnectedness, as a fundamental dimension of analytic work. It engenders new possibilities for extending the reach of psychoanalytic treatment to more disturbed patients. Here patient and analyst forge an emergent new entity of interconnectedness or "withness" that goes beyond the confines of their separate subjectivities and the simple summation of the two. Using a detailed clinical illustration of a difficult analysis with a severely fetishistic-masochistic patient, the author describes the kind of knowledge, experience, and powerful effects that come into being when the analyst interconnects psychically with the patient in living through the process, and that relate specifically to the analyst's compassion.

Following an introductory review of the main developments in the psychoanalytic thinking on perversion, the author focuses on her own understanding of perversion and its treatment, based on the psychoanalytic treatment of patients with severe sexual perversions. This paper uses the term ‘autotomy’ (borrowed from the fi eld of biology) to describe perversion formation as an ‘autotomous’ defence solution involving massive dissociative splitting in the service of psychic survival within a violent, traumatic early childhood situation; thus, a compulsively enacted ‘desire for ritualised trauma’ ensues. The specifi c nature of the perverse scenario embodies the specifi c experiential core quality of the traumatic situation. It is an actual repetition in the present of the imprint of a past destructive experience which is pre‐arranged and stage‐managed; it thus encounters haunting scenes of dread or psychic annihilation while, at the same time, controlling, sanitising and disavowing them. Hence, the world of severe perversion is no longer oedipal, but rather the world of Pentheus, Euripides's most tragic hero‐a world dominated by a mixture of a mother's madness, devourment, destruction and rituals of desire. According to this view, the (diffi cult) psychoanalytic treatment of perversion focuses on patient‐analyst interconnectedness‐brought about by the analyst's ‘givenness to being present’ or ‘presencing’‐at a deep, primary level of contact and impact (the emphasis being on the ontological dimension of experience). This evolving therapeutic entity creates and actualises a new, alternative experiential‐emotional reality within the pervert's alienated world, eventually generating a change in the perverse essence. The author illustrate this approach with three clinical vignettes.

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It is impossible to write about my personal development as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in Israel without relating to the powerful impact of the fate of the Jewish people on my family's history and therefore on mine. It is a history interwoven with narratives of loss and survival.My father was born in Poland, in the vicinity of Warsaw, to a wealthy family. When World War I reached that area, everybody ran for their lives, but my grandfather refused to abandon his lands and possessions. It was not until the very last moment that he decided to flee with his family, leaving his great wealth behind. My grandparents and their five small children made their way to Israel (then Palestine) with the money that my grandfather had managed to take with him, and mainly with the money obtained along the way from selling the jewelry my grandmother had received as a beautiful young bride and wife in this wealthy family. Years later, in my childhood, my grandmother, although a widow of many years, was still mourning the loss of her jewelry that had been sold, and particularly a dearly loved pair of diamond earrings, which had been taken from her and sold for passage on the ship to Israel. When the family finally arrived in Israel, my grandfather again bought up large tracts of land to cultivate. One day, he discovered Arab shepherds and their flocks trespassing on his fields; running towards them shouting, he had a heart attack and died on the spot. My grandmother remained a young widow with five children, and my father, the first son after two daughters, had to drop out of school and go to work in order to help support the family. The story of my mother's family was far more traumatic. Born in Latvia, then part of Poland, into an intellectual, Zionistic family, she was the only girl among four brothers. Her father was the headmaster of the Jewish school and the local Hebrew teacher. Her eldest brother immigrated to Israel as a pioneer on a kibbutz, and she was sent to join him because she was often ill with the flu and her doctor had recommended a sunny climate. This saved her from the brutal Nazi massacre of the rest of her family and the entire Jewish population in that region. Only my mother and her brother in Israel had survived the Holocaust, but not for long. My mother moved to Tel Aviv, worked hard to earn a living, and studied in a teacher's seminar. She then met my father and they married. Her brother remained on the kibbutz. He was an intellectually brilliant but sad person, overwhelmed by the loss of his entire family, lonely in the intense socializing of the kibbutz. He worked hard all day long planting and developing the kibbutz's orchard, and at night he read and