Welcome

I’m a clinical psychologist in New York City and Brooklyn

Two minds can achieve something greater than the sum of their parts. And so to me, psychotherapy is a project of two people, using nonjudgmental curiosity, to help the suffering, needs, and questions of the patient.

Some people seek therapy to address a discrete issue, other’s come for more elusive suffering and seek an open-ended inquiry into their life. I am here for both.

Instead of thinking about emotional struggles as problems to be cured, I’ve always felt that they are essential parts of who we become. Psychoanalysis helps to integrate our mental and emotional pains into ourselves rather than exile them and this is the route to becoming a fuller, more realized version of ourselves.

Whether over video or in-person, psychotherapy is a co-creative process and language is the creative medium. Words matter. The way you speak isn’t random but meaningful. Language tells me how you think, how your unique mind has evolved, how it suffers, and how the tendrils of the past influence your present.

These influences shape who we are, and unfortunately, sometimes we are shaped in ways that we dislike or even hate about ourselves. There aren’t many opportunities in regular life to talk about these parts of ourselves. They can be our most unusual, most shameful, or most self-sabotaging. They can be our contributions to conflicts in our relationships. So, I view the therapeutic relationship as being at the heart of the treatment because we need trust, non-judgmental curiosity, and vulnerability to make contact with these parts of you.

I have a thriving practice in Brooklyn that focuses on adults, teens, and couples using a psychoanalytic approach. I am open to all issues whether they are with family, relationships, romance, parenting, addictions, career, etc. I am keen to work with creatives and entrepreneurs, or anybody who is feeling creatively blocked. I enjoy working with both women and men but because I am a man, I have found that many men come to my practice. As a result I have become interested in issues surrounding masculinity and these issues probably influence you, no matter what your gender or sexuality is. I also have done a lot of work with people who have done or said things that were harmful to others, that they now regret, but likely destroyed relationships or careers they previously enjoyed. If you are a person like this and committed to a process of change, I’d be interested in speaking to you.

As a therapist, I believe in being interactive and conversational. I work hard to be emotionally attuned. I think humor can be an asset when appropriate. Therapy should feel like a normal conversation that operates on a very unusual level.

I became interested in psychoanalysis because I was not feeling meaningfully connected to a pre-med undergrad program. For most of my life I have been an artist. Painting and drawing have been powerful tools for understanding my own mental and emotional life. Medicine seemed to treat a deep emotional life as something to be tolerated at best and preferentially should be banished. So after a few years of feeling I was in a pointless direction, I discovered psychoanalysis and it became a lifelong pursuit and passion. I bring this passion to my work with my patients.

As an artist, I view psychotherapy as a co-creative process, a lot like making music. I like to think that the therapy process is like two musicians who have never met and don’t know what kind of music the other makes. For whatever reason, they are tasked to collaborate on an album. But things could get weird because, for all we know, one might be a hip-hop artist from California and the could be a jazz flautist from Morocco. So they need to have regular jam sessions. Sometimes the sessions will be abundant. Other times they could be bizarre and feel unfinished. Sometimes even they could be bad, unproductive, and even feel like they are taking the duo backwards. But as long as both of them feel like the album is a project worth doing, it will be. And in this case, our project is to use both of our minds to think deeply about you.

I also believe that life-long learning and a beginner’s mind are vital to a thriving life. As a result, I stay involved in a diversity of activities for my personal and professional development. I am in a number of weekly psychoanalytic reading, writing, and theory groups with colleagues. I write psychoanalytic research papers and present at conferences. I also am very interested in collaborating and supervising with the new generation of psychotherapists whether in a private practice session or through my work as a Clinical Associate at The New School’s Safran Psychotherapy, Assessment, and Research Service. I also keep a regular artistic practice.

I earned my Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research in New York City. I completed an internship at Lenox Hills Hospital and a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwell’s Zucker Hillside Hospital specializing in the treatment of first-episode psychotic breaks, severe mental illness, and high-conflict crisis resolution. For the past 20 years I have worked across settings, in private practice and in a variety of NYC psychiatric units and hospitals. I have advanced training in attachment theory / attachment disorders, personality disorders, and Relational Psychoanalysis. I am mostly an out-of-network provider but will gladly help you submit claims to your insurance for reimbursement.

I hope you will reach out.