I am a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. After completing my PhD at the University of Rochester, I sought psychoanalytic training at the scholarly but also whimsical Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity in NYC. Since then, I’ve taught at several psychoanalytic institutes including the National Institutes for Psychotherapy, the Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, the Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy of New Jersey; and currently, at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. I have taught classes on gender and sexuality, on comparative intersubjectivity, on the contributions of theorist Tom Ogden, and on my own conceptualizations of psychoanalytic phenomenology, personal agency, and the semiotics of desire. My passionate interest in psychoanalytic theory and writing is reflected in my published scholarly essays in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division/Review, and The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

Prior to my training as a psychoanalyst, I held a wide variety of clinical positions, including as a psychologist for preschool, latency aged children, and adolescents in day and residential treatment settings; and later, for inpatient adolescent and adult treatment programs. I have also worked in college mental health and served as a consultant to the Tufts University Counseling Center and its training

My specific interest lies in the art of clinical listening to conscious and unconscious communications; and in how we use ourselves as subjects in an ongoing process of meaning-creation. I see therapy as dedicated to creating and sustaining an experience of aliveness, in work and in love. I pay close attention to the ways in which patients use language and have found that understanding the “talking cure”—which includes listening to and translating not only verbal language but also unconscious, enigmatic, bodily messages—as a process of communicative empowerment has been a useful and results-oriented way of working. My goal is to help members of my practice gain increased fulfillment in their intimate lives and free themselves from their presenting symptoms, but also to emerge with increased curiosity about themselves and others and with an enhanced capacity to communicate and to engage in creative, impactful ways with and in the world beyond themselves.

Through my clinical experience, I have become fascinated by the ways in which we can understand psychoanalysis as a democratic practice —as a process of democratic transition. Exploring how I can help members of my practics claim their agency and capacity to contribute their distinct singular gifts and destiny in both private and public life is a question that sustains my ongoing clinical and theoretical exploration. At the same time, I listen for the paradoxical interplay between the personal and the universal or transcendent dimensions of subjective and symbolic life.

Since 2020, I’ve sharpened my attunement to these questions through the study of indigeneous healing modalities and how psychedelic and nonordinary experiences complement personal therapy to help guide life paths and possibilities, while also tapping into a process of collective awakening, global healing, and intuitive dimensions of an evolutionary consciousness. Facilitating this transformation has been my engagement with an ethno-medical healing center in the Peruvian Amazon and coursework in sacred plant medicine, in Integration training through ICEERS Academy, and my membership (including training in ketamine assisted therapy) in the Journey Clinical community.

Some of what I’ve discovered and am thinking about is articulated in my book (written with contributions by Michael Macrone), Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire (Karnac Books, 2016).