Consultation
(John Ruskin)
I offer case consultation and supervision to licensed therapists, providing a safe, reflective space to explore your clinical work, address special clinical and ethical dilemmas, and, sometimes, to discuss writing and teaching projects. Consultation allows for the processing of the emotional and intellectual challenges that are a life-long part of being a psychotherapist, and it should also foster continuing growth, confidence, and pleasure in being a therapist.
Since I have a great respect for the usefulness of the many clinical theories that have flourished during the first 100 years of our profession, I am particularly interested in supporting therapists who wish to integrate these into a more experience-near, nuanced, consistent and authentic professional voice.
An essential assumption of this way of reflecting on the clinical process is that concepts and techniques from different schools may be usefully employed without necessarily embracing the entire theory from which they are drawn. In this spirit, we may make use of key concepts borrowed from the diverse idioms of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Lacan, Matte-Blanco, Fairbairn, Sullivan, the Relational school, and the existential analysts that have been 'pressure-tested' in clinical work and proven useful.
I believe this approach maximizes the capacity to keep ourselves open and provide optimal help to those with whom we work by addressing 1) what we think is happening in their emotional worlds, 2) what we think is happening in the co-created intersubjective space between us, and 3) and what we think is happening in our own emotional experience as we attempt to work analytically with them.