Psychotherapy

Depth-oriented therapy for people who want to do real work, but not necessarily on the couch.

What this work is

Psychotherapy, as I practice it, is psychoanalytic in spirit. We sit face to face. We meet once a week, sometimes twice. The work draws on the same theoretical foundations that shape my analytic practice — the unconscious, early relationships, the way patterns repeat — but the rhythm is different from formal analysis, and so is what we can accomplish together.

Patients come to this kind of therapy for many reasons. Anxiety that has not loosened. Depression that has settled in. A relationship that hurts in a way that is hard to name. A long-standing sense of being stuck in a life that looks fine from the outside. Grief. Identity. The dynamics of family. Patterns that recur no matter how clearly you see them. None of these are problems to be solved in six sessions. They are the texture of an inner life that wants to be understood.

How I work

My approach is calm, direct, and depth-oriented. I do not believe in rushing toward insight, nor in collapsing complex inner lives into diagnoses. I am not going to tell you what to do. I am going to listen carefully — to what you say, to what you do not yet have words for, to what arises between us — and together we will try to understand what is actually happening beneath your symptoms.

What I ask of you

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not a brief intervention. It asks something of you, and it is fair that I name what.

I see psychotherapy patients a minimum of once a week. I do not work less frequently than that. The reason is not arbitrary: meaningful psychoanalytic work requires the continuity of weekly contact. Less than that, and the work loses the thread.

I also ask that patients commit to at least six months of weekly work before we evaluate together where we stand. This is not because the work always ends at six months — most often it does not — but because the early period of any therapy involves real upheaval, and decisions made in the middle of that upheaval rarely serve the patient well. Six months gives us enough time to know what we have.

How long the work continues after that is something we discover together, depending on what you came in for, what is emerging, and what you want for your life. Some patients work with me for a year. Others stay much longer. The length is not predetermined.

If you are considering this kind of work

The first conversation is not a commitment. We talk, and you decide. If we begin, we begin honestly — knowing what the work asks for, and trusting that something genuine can come of it.