MY PRACTICE

Typically, people consult a therapist or analyst because they need help with specific problems in their everyday lives. Some seek help because they’re plagued by more acutely subjective distress or disturbance: grief, depression, anxiety, medical or somatic concerns, suicidal anguish. Many times, such presenting problems and symptoms overlay deeper suffering and longings.

Thus psychoanalysis, or insight-oriented psychotherapy or couples therapy provides the scaffolding, succor, and understanding which people can use as they attempt to move through difficult moments, transitions and experiences in their lives. It can also create a holding and containing environment that fosters a fuller, more authentic self-awareness. Such self-awareness can, over time, translate into a greater internal serenity and a more satisfying capacity to love, work, and play. 

When a therapeutic treatment is responsive, receptive, and caring, patients often find that they’re able to cultivate, in their lives, more creativity, integrity, joy, intensity, and freedom — a real experience and manifestation of a true self. By experiencing oneself as balanced, robust and true, one is more likely to experience life — love and work — in a more meaningful and fulsome way. 

- Psychotherapy -

Psychotherapy — specifically psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy — hinges on the conviction that the capacity to work through such troubles and develop a more robust sense of emotional health and well-being resides within the individual. The psychotherapeutic process, therefore, involves fostering, within each patient, a full and complex curiosity and understanding of their relationships, worries, motivations, internal psychic difficulties and dynamics, their past as it is present. 

In this type of talk therapy, the process unfolds largely through the relationship as it develops between the patient who suffers and the therapist or analyst — me — who brings deep training as well as a capacity and motivation to observe, consider and address that suffering. Within this special and specialized human contact lies the potential for patients to feel heard, seen, comforted, and helped — even when they bring into the conversation what is felt to be difficult, uncomfortable, incompatible with one’s value, inconsistent with one’s self concept, shameful and guilty, even repellant.

Yet, as patients gain greater curiosity and insight, their thoughts, impulses, fantasies, feelings, motivations and behaviors become more conscious, more clearly and fully explicated — more comprehensible. Internal struggles that otherwise block vigorous psychological growth and functioning tend to resolve and diminish. As patients find that they can manage the demands of everyday living more effectively and with less internal discord and disturbance, many feel hopeful. And most significantly, they may well experience a subtle but dramatic sense of internal vigor and authenticity, and a conviction that life is worth living.

Typically, in psychotherapy, patient and analyst meet once or twice a week for an extended stretch of time.

- Psychoanalysis -

Psychoanalysis takes insight-oriented psychotherapy to another level — offering patients greater potential for self-understanding and deep and substantial change — a kind of transformation over time. 

Through heightened frequency — 3 to 5 times a week — and, often, the use of the couch, patients can feel more freed up and more deeply and sincerely familiar with themselves. Greater frequency offers continuity and emotional support — sufficient time — to allow one’s unconscious psychic life to emerge and become increasingly “visible” and recognized. Over time, one’s internal emotional life becomes, to a greater degree, the subject of the analytic conversation. In the context of the analytic relationship, things that might otherwise go unnoticed or that are wittingly or unwittingly pushed aside and avoided — Freudian slips and stray thoughts, shifting states of mind and mood, dreams, fantasies, seemingly random associations, somatic sense and experience — become the focus of concerted exploration. In the psychoanalytic exchange, the analyst and analysand increasingly hone in on the way one thinks — when and why, for example, the patient is able to or not able to engage in thinking, dreaming, playing and imagining — as well as what one thinks — the content of conscious and unconscious thought, the stories patients tell themselves. Patients become aware of the many ways their past is present. And as the patients conveys to the analyst the remnants, the echoes, the hauntings of their past, they may come to a new understanding of themselves.

As the analyst brings her own thinking and a neutral, non-judgmental curiosity to that which surfaces in the hour, patients often find that they too are increasingly able to replace harsh judgments and self-criticism with curiosity. Such curiosity paves the way for a deeper, truer, more nuanced self-understanding. Knowing more about what was until then unknown about oneself in terms of one’s internal impulses and motivations, bodily experiences, and relationships eventually fosters greater internal freedom and ease. Very often, distress and suffering mitigate, and repetitive patterns in behavior, feeling and thought diminish. Patients may come to feel, within time, more alive and real and to bear a more engaged life.

- Couples Therapy -

However committed or devoted, most every couple occasionally bumps up against troubles they can’t seem to work through on their own.

Through exploring and considering the roots and patterns of problems as they manifest individually and between the couple, therapy presents an opportunity for partners to learn new things about themselves and about each other. Greater understanding then translates into more effective ways of working with and through differences. In many cases, partners are able to resolve, with loving concern and compassion, disagreements that inevitably surface between two singular individuals. Generally speaking, couples therapy aims to help partners better understand and thereby quiet the static between them. Better understanding, in and of itself, tends to relieve distress and foster higher functioning within each member as well as between the couple. In many instances, each partner learns to minimize the pain and damage they inflict and, when damage is done, to make repair. Over time, both people in the relationship can come to understand themselves and their own needs as well as bring greater sensitivity and responsiveness to their partner and their partner’s needs.

- Consultation -

Typically short-term consultation provides individuals and families with the support and understanding they may need to sort through specific, circumscribed troubles in their lives and in themselves.

- Supervision -

I offer clinical supervision to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists — in training or in practice — as well as to other mental health care professionals. When it comes to theory insofar as it influences technique, I consider thinking over knowing, experience and intuition over interpretation and intellectual speculation, following affective shifts in the session over formulating dynamics, the ontological over the epistemological. Yet I recognize that all this — and more — make for an evolving, vital, useful psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic endeavor and supervisory experience. In my experience, theory comes alive through close work with clinical material, the here-and-now of the session, in the content and the climate in the room, so that over time, one not only learns about clinical practice but also develops a growing confidence and curiosity — a psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic identity and authority.