Working together
I like to view my role as collaborating with you to achieve a greater awareness of yourself, to develop more effective patterns of behavior, and to resolve undesirable or troubling emotions and interpersonal conflicts. I will listen to you carefully and deeply. During our work together, we may explore patterns of thoughts and feelings derived from your family of origin that affect your current life and relationships. Within the structure and support of the therapy relationship, these patterns become more apparent and conscious, and are thus more easily understood and changed.
Psychoanalytic Therapy
Psychoanalytic therapy is not an intellectual exercise. The therapist does not primarily teach the patient. The patient does not cognitively understand a new way of being and transform him/herself thereby. What happens is grounded in the experience of unconscious patterns that are actually lived out in the therapeutic relationship. The therapist interprets in the transference the immediate and primal emotional experience of the patient and it is through the new experience of old emotional patterns that insight is meaningfully achieved. The therapeutic frame, those restrictive rules limiting the nature of the relationship between the patient and therapist, creates a holding environment within which such experiences, often quite painful and anxiety provoking, can be contained, endured safely, and overcome. The therapist’s office should be the safest place the patient has ever experienced.
Establishing the “frame” of the therapy is critical for success and begins with the first phone call. Trust cannot happen quickly. It develops over time and the accumulation of experiences that the patient has with the therapist as a reliable and safe person. There can be no contact outside the clinical office other than coordinating or emergency phone calls/e-mails. Therapists do not and should not make house-calls or meet anywhere but the therapist’s office. With the possible exception of an initial handshake, there is absolutely no physical contact between the therapist and client at any time for any reason. This last rule is inflexible and necessary for everyone’s protection.
The two necessary elements that every client needs to bring to therapy (or at least be able to develop) are honesty and courage. They are inextricably intertwined. Psychoanalytic therapy has been called “the habit of honesty” (McWilliams, 2005) and it is always surprising how much courage it takes to be honest. Reality is not entirely malleable and without allowing the therapist to know what actually happened and how it actually effected you the therapy cannot be effective.
The goal is always to help the client become stronger in every aspect of their being. Happiness, endurance, courage, honesty, resilience, and other characteristics most clients want are all just synonyms for strength of character and will. You can become powerful with this method.
Dream interpretation
You may have had important dreams in the past and you may even have had periods where you have had no dreams. Dreams have fascinated us throughout history. In our work, dreams are an important way for us to access deep levels of meaning in your life. I encourage clients to bring their dreams to sessions and we will work together to discover their complex and multiple meanings.
There is no better way to expedite the transformation of unconscious thoughts and feelings to conscious awareness. The work may be difficult and challenging but if approached from the perspective of play and possibilities and not dogmatic judgment, much progress can be achieved.
Sexuality and the body
Many of us seem to lack the kind of sexuality and comfort with our bodies that we hope to have. Despite our cultural claims to radical openness on the subject of sexuality and despite pervasive media exploitation of sexual material it is clear that there are troubling sexual dynamics between partners that remain sources of pain and frustration. There seems to be something important missing from most peoples’ sexual lives. Freud put sexuality at the center of personal development and that appropriate and important legacy has been downgraded in most theoretical models in the last 50 years.
We need and deserve a vibrant, fulfilling, and satisfying sexuality that provides the bedrock for intimacy and relational growth. That is possible only if clients can honestly address long repressed prejudices and unacknowledged patterns that block a healthy and natural approach to their own bodies and those of their partners.
Child Development
As infants/children we all need to be raised. We do not simply grow up, at least in any whole or healthy way. The human self is a direct function of the infant’s nurturing environment, inevitably focused on the mother as container of the infant’s experience of the world. The role of the father is critical both as a container for the mother's experience and as an independent relationship with the child that fosters healthy development. The self is formed as the accumulation of experiences both good and bad in that matrix of love and care. The “psychological birth” of the human comes long after the physical birth. All psychopathology can be attributed to failure of this nurturing matrix at some point after birth. The earlier the failure, the greater the severity of the pathology.
Fortunately, parents do not have to be perfect in order to avoid pathologizing their children. In the words of D. W. Winnicott, they just have to be “good enough.” It is the small, occasional failures that are endured that let the infant/child know that he or she is separate and needs to grow strong to survive. Normal, adaptive, useful parental failures are not traumatic to the child. They are, in fact, necessary to motivate continued growth. In the face of good enough parenting, the infant/child proceeds through a recognized series of developmental steps, each of which requires different parental responses.
We are an adaptive species. We are the children of survivors: those ancestors who withstood astonishing hardships over evolutionary time. The structurally weak or maladaptive have already died out. Our children need our love but they also need to be challenged to grow. Achieving a healthy balance between those dual necessities of development is the primary parental task.
Parental Development
To give to a child what we ourselves were never given is one of the hardest things imaginable. If we are to be good enough parents, we must heal ourselves of those developmental dislocations that stunted our own growth. Without parental development that achieves a healthy and strong sense of self, parents will inevitably inflict their pathologies on their children. It is called the “intergenerational transmission of pathology” and it can be, it must be overcome. I offer both individual and couples therapy designed to make you better, stronger, healthier, and ready to parent your children to robust health. I also offer consultations focused on parental psychological education designed to give you the tools to help you understand the developmental tasks your child must accomplish and how you can help. You owe it to yourself and you certainly owe it to your children to give them every opportunity to succeed. Life will always be filled with challenges, dangers, and opportunities. Become stronger so that you can help your children to face life with confidence.