In our modern era of brain research, people’s experience of living risks reduction to biochemicals and brain structures.  Love, happiness, sadness, misery and even trauma are too often explained away as being related solely to brain regions, pathways and neurotransmitters.  While these remarkable scientific advances allow us to understand more of the ways biological systems function to create human experience these are often merely descriptive rather than explanatory. As a psychoanalyst I believe the risk is a reduction of all human essence to an objectified, mechanistic system which denies the most salient of all human capacity: imagination. Our capacity to create is what allows us to move towards our own possibilities and to reduce the suffering that holds us back. 

 

Psychoanalytic theories strive to understand the uniqueness of every human person, lending meaning and value to how we make our lives significant through relationships and in the evolution of values by which we choose and behave.  As a treatment, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapies facilitate maturing processes and unlock both internal emotional and cognitive potential to better grapple with life’s challenges and uncertainties.  In my work, I treat people, not diagnoses.  The cornerstone of this process is in finding change not through skills but through self-understanding.  In my practice, I work to help patients understand what is alive in them and what is stuck and support facing the parts that may have remained bottled up and inaccessible.  The therapy is about creating a relationship that supports the emergence of what is alive under the surfaces and behind the addictions, unhealthy relationships and fruitless attempts to feel powerful.  Dynamic and analytic therapy has as its aim the development of a compassionate sense of oneself and a normalizing perspective on how we relate to our world and to others.  

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My practice is designed towards reducing what may feel intolerable or unbearable or get in the way of living most fully.  Central to my goals with patients is the mission of advancing both one’s self-understanding and the promotion of personal growth.  Symptoms are viewed as expressions of suffering and treatment is the development of insight about personal truths through introspection.  My role as a therapist is to serve as a guide in exploring one’s private mind, to provide safeguards from the fear of self-knowledge and as a witness to the self-truths which may need to be proclaimed.  Guiding and witnessing happens as we look into your fears, dreams, imagination and fantasies together and create healthy attachment that increases all your capacity to live less symptomatically and more in honor of all your personal value and purpose.  Above all, I consider the work I do with patients a privilege and a responsibility.  I work best with patients who are equally committed and responsible to and about the work we commit to do, together.

 

My practice offers treatment for individuals ages 18+ and for couples. 

Clients are welcome for any and all their terms of self-determination and regardless their religious, sexual, gender, racial or ethnic affiliation.