A Psychoanalytic Approach to Lasting Change

Psychoanalytic therapy is a form of talk therapy that looks beneath your immediate symptoms to the deeper, often unconscious patterns driving them, so the change you make is lasting rather than temporary.

I am a psychoanalyst trained in contemporary interpersonal and relational principles. Together, we’ll pay attention to patterns—both the ones you already recognize and those that may be hiding in plain sight. You may find yourself taking on the same role in different relationships, being drawn to the same kinds of people, or discovering that the way you do one thing is often the way you do many things.

Some of the patterns that now limit you may have begun as creative solutions to problems earlier in your life. Those solutions often outlive the circumstances that made them necessary.

Whatever difficulties you have in your life outside therapy will eventually find their way into the room with me.

That's not a sign that therapy has gone wrong. On the contrary, it gives us an unusual opportunity: instead of only talking about your patterns, we can experience and understand them together, from the inside, as they're happening—and have a better chance of doing something different.

This is the kind of work I specialize in. It requires a therapeutic relationship in which we can speak openly, tolerate discomfort, and stay with difficult questions long enough for something new to emerge. Over time, this can give you more freedom to live differently, rather than continuing to repeat the same old patterns.

  • Psychoanalytic therapy starts from the premise that knowing what's good for us isn't always enough to make us do it. We can want and, at the same time, not want something; repeat patterns we know aren't working; and sometimes be surprisingly mysterious to ourselves. Psychoanalytic therapy helps us understand and work with these contradictions, rather than assuming that insight or advice alone will resolve them.

  • They exist on a continuum rather than being two entirely different treatments. Both involve the same kind of attention to unconscious patterns, but psychoanalysis typically involves meeting more frequently—often several times per week—which can deepen and intensify the process in ways that are difficult to achieve in less frequent therapy.

  • That depends on what brings you to therapy, what you’re hoping to accomplish, and how intensively we decide to work. I see patients anywhere from once to several times per week. Meeting more frequently is one of the tools we have for deepening and intensifying the work, and we'll decide together what makes sense for you.