Emanuel L. Berman, PhD, 2011

Emanuel Berman was born in Warsaw in 1946, and came to Israel in 1950. He studied clinical psychology at Tel Aviv University, and received his PhD from Michigan State University in 1973. He went through two sequences of psychoanalytic training, first at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and then at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute, in both of which he is now on the faculty. Since 1976 he is a faculty member at the University of Haifa, where he headed the clinical psychology program and founded a postgraduate program in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He was one of founders of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and is active at the International Psychoanalytic Association, for which he headed the Liaison Committee with the Polish Psychoanalytic Society. He is the Chief International Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and his work has been published in Hebrew, English, French, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Turkish. His major areas of interest are the history of psychoanalysis (and particularly the life and work of Ferenczi and of Winnicott), psychoanalytic training (the topic of his book Impossible Training: A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education, Analytic Press/Routeledge, 2004), the historical and political context of psychoanalysis (especially the Middle East conflict), and the relation of psychoanalysis to literature and to film (he edited Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, NYU Press, 1993). He has been editing since 1993 a series of Hebrew translations of psychoanalytic literature, including the work of Freud, Ferenczi, Winnicott, Balint, Kohut, Hanna Segal, Ogden and others. An autobiographical essay of his appeared in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 30(2), 2010.