I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in full time private practice in center city Philadelphia.
Through a process of mutual dialogue I provide a safe and fully confidential space to facilitate exploration and growth. My goal is to help individuals feel that they are in control of their lives and feel a sense of mastery, personal competence and aliveness. Inhibitions, self esteem, problems in regulating moods, excessive feelings of anxiety, depression, fear, identity confusion, self sabotage and difficulty in being assertive all interfere with an optimal sense of healthy pride, esteem and confidence. I have extensive clinical experience treating anorexia bulimia/nervosa, dissociation and trauma spectrum disorders.
As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist I help people to gain insight into internal mental conflicts that have not served them well. Thus, causing a sense of dissatisfaction or unhappiness due to unconscious and conscious feelings and desires that determine expectations, ways of thinking and phantasy.
Emotional healing takes place through the empathic work of a committed working relationship between psychotherapist and patient that is radically individualized and fully confidential. For the most optimal change this is essential for a successful psychotherapy whether it is an expressive/insight oriented or supportive process.
My practice is not engineered to a specific model of ‘technique’ but rather an approach of humanness to the fullest extent possible.
What is Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy?
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is about uncovering and understanding unconscious and conscious scripts and desires that determine expectations, behaviors, thinking and phantasy.
Its approach is reflectively informative through a process of talking and informed listening. One of the central aims is the achievement of gaining emotional insight with a sense of renewed humility and compassion complementary to gaining the desired life changes.
People are shaped through various factors in life such as; genetic and biological determinants and are influentially shaped in a more fluid way through cultural and social learning. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy explores how an individual responds through such adaptive strategies from a contextual perspective. It is a process of understanding through the lens the person was given to see and hear. This way psychoanalytic psychotherapy offers a place to recognize and acknowledge how such factors fit into the context of the whole person going back to the formative years.
The emotional and behavioral dynamic patterns become deeply rooted creating specific ways of relating to self and others, self image, personal history and memory. When internal or external life changes occur conflictual tensions are more frequently brought to the fore often with a resilience that makes it hard to change.
In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we can work sufficiently to reorganize an experience through understanding about what makes these habitual dynamisms unique and necessary to better adjust to the present. And, with a realization of what it means to be functioning at the optimal level and what it means to be authentically present.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy allows us then to take a closer look at a person’s response patterns and practices so that what can get worked out through talking will not get repeatedly lived out.