My Background
I received my PhD in Clinical Psychology from The Graduate Center of CUNY. My dissertation research was a study of nonverbal communication between mothers and their 10 month old infants. Two years of training at Mt. Sinai/St Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan followed. The first year was adult inpatient and outpatient, the second year Fellowship was Child and Adolescent outpatient. Next I did a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Columbia University Health Services, Counseling and Psychological Services Division.
My experience with college students shaped my professional approach more than any other training I’ve received. University students represent a relatively small age range (18-40), but they present with an amazing array of problems and young adulthood is a tremendously robust time in development.
My academic and clinical training was comprised of several theoretical strands—
psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, cognitive, developmental, psychoeducational, psychiatric—at Columbia they somehow knit together and I became comfortable drawing upon all the skills and theories I had learned. Simply put, I utilize all that I know and have experienced to make psychotherapy helpful, strengthening, inspiring, and healing. And that precise recipe of techniques is different for every person I work with.
I am a native Californian who moved to New York to attend Barnard College, from which I graduated in 1982. Prior to becoming a psychologist I worked as a bond trader on Wall Street for seven years.