Experience

Practicing psychotherapy since 2012

Methods and Influences

• Psychoanalysis

  (including j. Bowlby, r. Fairbairn, d.w. winnicott, b. beebe & f. lachman, j. levinson, r. karen, l. shengold, o. renik)

• Psychodynamic psychotherapy

  (see above)

• Relational Gestalt

  (the relational center)

• Radical inclusion

  (including c. west, t. wise, a. tizon, s. faludi, a. haider, w.e.b. dubois, d. roediger, m. bader, l. cavilla-sforza)

Psychotherapy is my life’s work. I'm also an artist and a writer. As a therapist, I’m fairly active; you won't be talking to a “blank screen.” Your pain, and the questions you face, are my focus in every session. My specialty areas include men's issues, life transitions, relationships, depression, anxiety, creativity, and stuckness, and the psychological issues that arise in relation to personal development.

Before I became a therapist I was a literary scholar and professor of English in NY, NJ, and VT. So I understand the stresses of academic life, the burdens of intellectual ambition, the joys and agonies of artistic practice (I’m a poet with several books, and an active sculptor). I loved teaching, but the pain I saw in my students eventually stirred me to seek a career directly centered on emotional healing. I completed more degrees and trainings, and became licensed in Los Angeles, California, where I practiced until my return to Brooklyn in 2020. Today I am licensed in NY, CA, TX, and NJ, and work both virtually and in-person in Park Slope.

From that background in English I also bring to therapy a working knowledge of many great texts that still illuminate our lives. Dante, for example, describes two kinds of pain: in Inferno, there is a fire that hurts but does not instruct, whereas in Purgatory, suffering teaches people how to move forward and up the mountain of experience. Centuries later, Freud’s great paper “Mourning and Melancholia” made a very similar comparison, but on different grounds. For me, literature and psychoanalysis deepen each other.

You and I will work as a team to find the source of what holds you back and weighs you down. I will give you skilled, gentle guidance as you change, while providing the support you need as you begin to feel better about yourself and your life. Contact me today for a free consultation, at 917-873-0292.
 

Licenses

California LMFT 93475.

New York LMFT 001694-01.

New Jersey LMFT 37FI00221700.

Texas LMFT 205048.

Education

Member, New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. Doctor of Psychology in Psychoanalysis, 2019.

Member, American Psychoanalytic Association.

Dissertation: Work Inhibition in Midlife Men: “Because I Am Not Good Enough For Anything, Nothing Is Good Enough For Me.” Dissertation Committee: Estelle Shane, Elena Bezzubova, Steven Axelrod.

2012 M.A. in Psychology, Antioch University, Los Angeles.

1995 Ph.D. English & American Literature, Brandeis University.

Dissertation: The Construction of the Transcendental Term in Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, with chapters on John Keats and Walt Whitman. Brandeis University, February 1995. Dissertation Committee: John Burt, William Flesch, Allen Grossman, Langdon Hammer (Yale University).