A conversation with Anne Alvarez

"From her book Live Company and her other publications, I have come to think of Alvarez's work as having a unique recognizable style. She writes most usually and most beautifully about deep, often frightening engagements with patients whom she makes so human and salvageable despite their terrible alienation, their psychic conditions of emptiness and their grotesque symptoms. I suspect that it is a big part of her clinical power and efficacy that she can mentalize such patients, find common human ground amid their stark and terrible Otherness" ( Adriana Harris 2009).

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Anne Alvarez's unique voice has been with us for almost 50 years. She has become known for her intensive psychoanalytic work with autistic children and other hopeless children, children who had become dead to the world in every practical sense.  Alvarez writes about her unique engagements with patients in her own unique voice, which combines Kleinain's theory, developmental psychology, and themes from literature, art, and music.  Alvarez stresses the therapist's capacity to be active to the extent of expressing alarm, gravity, and delight in place of neutrality, adaptation, and containment.

In this conversation, Aner Govrin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman will discuss with Alvarez her theoretical Kleinian roots, autism and its treatment, empty states, the analyst's use of the self within the psychotherapeutic encounter, and how new learning and internalization can occur in the context of safety. Finally, we will try to understand Alvarez's faith in psychoanalysis, with the most inaccessible of children, against all odds, connecting with them, human being to human being.