About me

It was an afternoon in late spring, and I was playing badminton with a friend when, almost playfully, I blurted out my desire. Once I had said out loud that I wanted to become a psychoanalyst, I had to reconsider many things, including letting go of the prospects for research and an academic career that were opening up as I came to the end of my master’s degree in Literary Theory. Swallowing my desire back down, though, was out of the question: I knew it was something too precious, something that had emerged after years of working on myself in analysis, and I instinctively felt that the time had come for me to lose something I had considered fundamental to who I was and to my personality, and to make room for something new.

The common thread guiding my work as a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in training is rooted in the memory of that afternoon and, in keeping with the psychoanalytic orientation of my approach, involves thinking about distress and questioning it, to understand what it is trying to tell us about our desires and what we are failing to see that concerns us intimately — and that sometimes even reaches into our bodies rather than let itself be ignored. This goes beyond the form a symptom takes: it is important to me to see my patients as people with a unique story, not as walking diagnostic labels.