Walking dogs in Santa Monica and other pathways to dynamic systems: Jeffrey and Gabriel Trop in conversation with Sarah Mendelsohn

At the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology conference in 2019, I attended a plenary, A Dynamic View of Self hood, Affect and Political Context. It was a dynamite panel chaired by Peter Maduro with presenters Gita Zarnegar, and Jeffrey and Gabriel Trop. The material stayed with me. So did my curiosity about this father and son duo. I was familiar with Jeffrey’s earlier collaboration with Atwood et al. (1989) but not yet with Gabriel’s work. I promptly read their co-authored paper, Self Psychology and the Concept of the Nuclear Self: A Dynamic Systems Perspective (J. Trop & Trop, 2018). Recently, I had the great privilege of speaking with them together. We began by talking about how they came to collaborate.