About
I practice psychoanalytic therapy, which seeks to illuminate how unconscious processes shape our relationships, inner life, and experience of self: it is for those whose lives bear the scars of complex beginnings with histories not easily spoken, yet deeply felt. What we explore together is not a treatment of symptoms alone. Therapy is a rigorous process by which we trace the origins of your suffering to their earliest formations. The mind speaks in patterns, defences, and repetitions; with each therapeutic encounter, we arrive at a deeper understanding of these structures.
I often work with people whose struggles centre on the fabric of personality itself—how a sense of self is maintained, reality is experienced, and others are known. I also support those living with chronic illness, where the body and psyche are not separate territories. Pain has a psychological life, and so does the slow, often unwitnessed work of enduring it.
Many who present with personality organization also carry what are clinically named as discrete disorders of mood, anxiety, and perception; however, in psychoanalytic understanding, these are rarely separate from the character structure in which they arise. Mood disturbance speaks to difficulties in the internal regulation of affect and the management of loss. Anxiety, whether expressed in persistent worry, compulsion, or somatic distress, often signals an inner conflict with origins outside conscious awareness. Where psychotic experience is present, the boundary between inner and outer world has become unstable or permeable. Eating disorders are understood as the body made to speak what cannot yet be said about control, desire, punishment, and worth.
Personality organization is a way of understanding the architecture of the self: how identity is held, how reality is experienced, and how relationships are internally structured. Within this framework, I work with the full range of personality presentations:
Cluster A Personality (i.e., paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal) presentations often reflect a profound withdrawal from relational life, a deep mistrust of others' intentions, or an experience of the self as fundamentally estranged from the social world. The therapeutic work is one of creating the conditions under which another person can become slowly tolerable and even meaningful.
Cluster B Personality (i.e., borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial) presentations tend to be marked by intensity of affect, relational need, and self-experience. These are lives lived close to the surface, where internal pain finds expression in the body, in relationship, and in action. Therapy attends to the underlying vulnerabilities that these structures were formed to protect.
Cluster C Personality (i.e., avoidant, dependent, and obsessional) presentations are often organized around fear of rejection, of abandonment, and of one's own aggression or desire. What presents as rigidity, compliance, or self-effacement frequently conceals a rich and conflicted inner life. The work here is one of careful, unhurried expansion.
In all of these presentations, the concern is the same: not the removal of symptoms, but the understanding of what they have been protecting, and the gradual construction of a self that no longer requires them.