Approach

A conversation

Psychoanalytic therapy begins with whatever is on your mind: a relationship, a memory, a dream, an argument you keep replaying, a question you cannot resolve, or simply the feeling you arrive with that day. You do not need to prepare or know where to begin. We begin there and see where the conversation takes us.

What makes the work psychoanalytic is the way we listen. We notice what returns, what changes in the telling, what is difficult to say, and what happens when language breaks down. Gradually, connections emerge between the life you are living now and the experiences that have shaped what you expect from others, what you believe about yourself, and what has become difficult to imagine or express.

Our work takes place through conversation and through what happens between us as we talk. No single conversation has to explain everything. It is the continuity of the work that allows us to notice what a single encounter might miss, and to find words for what may have been present for so long that it escaped conscious notice.

We understand ourselves in relationship

Much of who we become takes shape between people. Our earliest relationships teach us ways of seeking closeness, managing anger, earning approval, avoiding disappointment, and making ourselves understood. Some continue to serve us. Others persist after the circumstances that made them necessary have changed.

You may assume the same role in very different relationships, or understand a pattern perfectly well and still find yourself caught in it again. Together, we become curious about how it works: what it protects, what it makes possible, and what it costs. We ask what belongs to the present, and what you may be carrying into it.

What happens between us

Our relationship gives us an immediate place to explore these questions. You may worry about what I think of you, want me to understand something without having to say it, feel angry or misunderstood, try to please me, or wonder whether something is safe to tell me.

We can pause at those moments. Something that happens too quickly to process elsewhere—a withdrawal, an accommodation, an argument—can become something we can think about together.

I am a real person in the room with you. I can misunderstand you, miss something important, or say something that does not feel right. Your response matters. Being willing to examine my part in an encounter is central to how I work.

My part in the conversation

I listen closely, ask questions, remember what you have told me, and draw connections for us to consider. I am particularly interested in the places where the story becomes complicated: where what you want and what you do diverge, contradictory feelings coexist, or a convincing explanation leaves something important unexplained.

An interpretation is a possibility, not a verdict. You may recognize yourself in it, disagree with it, change it, or find that your objection opens something neither of us had considered.

You do not need to agree with me to do this work.

Sometimes your disagreement is precisely what we need to hear.

We can question our assumptions and consider how fear, longing, and fantasy shape what feels certain.