During my training in medicine and psychiatry, I learned from therapists and analysts who drew from many different depth psychology perspectives—Freudian, Object Relations, Intersubjective, Existentialist, and Jungian. I went on to study to become a Jungian Analyst because of my abiding belief in the reality of the psyche and my commitment to the healing power that attending to images—whether in dreams or in waking life—can provide.

In more than two decades of working as a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, I have found ways of helping people recover and grow that are guided by the individual person’s psyche. In order to do this, I draw on the broad and deep resources of depth psychologies, the body-based and scientific wisdom of medicine and psychiatry, and resources provided by the many forms of art that humans instinctively have created for millennia.

I work with adults, children, adolescents and college students—people who come because they suffer from anxiety, depression, trauma, loss, relationship problems, medical illness, challenges in parenting, crisis of meaning in mid-life, creative and professional blocks, as well as with curiosity about different directions that their lives could take.

Medication

In the course of my practice, I have come to appreciate the potential advantages as well as pitfalls of using psychiatric medication as part of psychotherapy with adults, children and adolescents. While at times a person’s suffering or developmental impasse can be navigated well only if medication is part of the treatment, my experience has been that this is more the exception than the rule.

One of the most valuable lessons I have learned is that despite great contributions made by medical research it is never possible to predict in advance how useful or problematic any medication will be for a particular individual. I therefore approach the use of medication with great humility.

I believe that my role is to provide the people who work with me with current information about the possible risks and benefits of medications that might be helpful. Together we arrive at decisions regarding whether to undertake a trial of medication. We also pay attention to what meaning using—or not using—medication may have to the therapy overall.