Selecting a therapist is one of the most emotionally stirring and demanding tasks you will ever undertake. In addition to finding what feels like a “good match,” you may find yourself simultaneously confronting your deepest fears and anxieties about trust, vulnerability, and exposure – paradoxically, the very reasons you are seeking treatment – and all fairly universal reactions. You are not alone. As a psychoanalyst, I am trained to understand and address your very human concerns.
This task is demanding enough, but we now must maneuver through what was once a discrete and reliable clinical field with stable and reasonably neutral boundaries that has been contaminated by ideological and political minefields and agendas that are divisive, often very bigoted, and threaten to undermine the transformational process.
You deserve a clinician who seeks to learn about you. I focus on your life and all the themes that necessarily play out with me so that as you shift, you feel enriched, enlivened, and experience greater degrees of flexibility and satisfaction. This is not a quick behavioral fix. To make ample room for the full spectrum of your emotional experiences – laughter, tears, grief, regrets, sorrows, moods, fears, vulnerabilities, doubts, shame, and curiosity – I do not impose my own beliefs or proselytize. I reveal only what might be useful to you.
Political or ideological proselytizing is no more acceptable in this intimate, interpersonal sphere than religious proselytizing. Nowhere in anyone’s legal scope of practice are these things considered therapeutic or clinically beneficial to the patient. I firmly reject the unethically politicized, propaganda-driven, ideological takeover of psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry.
There is also a reason you want a clinician with a valid state license; she is mandated to follow both the ethical standards associated with her license and the legal state laws and standards designating scope of practice. I add to that a guiding personal moral philosophy.
“Ideological activism” has become a popular way to virtue signal political views disingenuously (with no consequences) and insert them in the consulting room or educational environment where they do not belong. “Activism” now takes precedence over clinical integrity in medical, psychological, and psychoanalytic organizations, and that trickles down and contaminates clinical work and educational programs. And clearly, popularity has nothing to do with your needs and very little to do with psychoanalysis as a very serious genre that rests on a compendium of piggy-backing theories that continue to evolve even though Freud lit the first curious match nearly 150 years ago.
The American Psychiatric Association just bestowed an award to a holocaust revisionist. The American Psychological Association is being investigated by the federal government for grossly undeniable and repetitive acts of overt antisemitism, and the American Psychoanalytic is tearing itself apart similarly.
Clinical activism replicates the intellectual and moral failures abundantly evident in the declining academic and epistemological rigor and standards that have become normalized at our finest universities and colleges over the past thirty-five years. Serious and demanding scholarship has been replaced with the elevation of pre-digested, sophomoric gibberish punctuated by cosplaying dress-up “protests” and sloganeering that only masquerades as scholarship or ethical conduct. Some university students never learned to think critically; it is lately reported that many do not understand fractions. A recently exposed Harvard president apparently plagiarized parts of her dissertation and was forced to abdicate in shame. These are all signs of academic and intellectual decline.
Unfortunately, while ubiquitous clinical activism has become very accepted and acceptable, it is no more legitimate than activism among journalists. In fact, it is equally dangerous, because it promotes opinions and manufactured narratives that often have no basis in historical or factual reality.
Political activism has no place in psychoanalytic/psychiatric/psychological vocational and educational spheres; it is divisive and undermines our capacity to fulfill our vocational mandates in ways proven to actually change lives for the better. Clinical activism and organized social activism are not equivalencies.
Psychotherapy is not “social action. It is a non-directive, intimate exchange focused on the patient’s feelings, thoughts, and emotional experiences. Social action represents a goal-directed, communal undertaking that actually improves the lives of groups of others; it definitely is not a manipulative effort to interfere with the organic and slow process of self-understanding. Simply spewing opinions, falsities, and propaganda derived from the social media echo chamber where there are no facts (only narratives and opinions) and no consequences improves no one’s life and no social ills.
As a high school student, I volunteered as a teacher’s assistant in the summer Head Start program, provided companionship for isolated nursing home patients, and volunteered at our local hospital when I was even younger. I learned about dementia and saw a dead body for the first time in my life when I was fourteen. I developed a nascent sense of civic belonging, responsibility, and empathy. That is social action. It requires integrity and humility; it is focused on addressing particular needs of others. It is not self-aggrandizement, virtue signaling, or cheap publicity that gins up pious moral outrage.
Bigotry and deceit masquerading as morality is now being used as a marketing tool and business model at many academic institutions, and agreement with conspiracy theories and propaganda has become the litmus tests for membership or acceptance. To insert this into the consulting room might be considered a gross manipulation bordering on malpractice.
Consider how the concept of “Intersectionality,” a weak intellectual shortcut that bypasses critical thinking and creates geopolitical, cultural, and social “links” where they exist only in wishful fantasy, became the driver and tool of the oppressor/oppressed dialectic and false claims about colonialism and indigeneity among certain groups of people. Garbage in, garbage out.
As soon as a psychoanalyst’s commitment to the theory-driven compendium and frame that defines our professional scope bleeds out of its proper lane, it signifies an ethical and clinical lapse that will dilute and compromise an elegant, mutative therapeutic process that asks us to relinquish what is understood as “memory and desire.”
To follow its course, every session must unfold unencumbered by the clinician’s personal interests or political manipulations. This means that after undergoing hundreds of hours of our own personal psychoanalysis, fulfilling a demanding 5 ½ year-long didactic program, and undertaking three year-long clinical control cases at four times a week under weekly supervision, we have learned that imposing our political, cultural, or religious views is unacceptable; it compromises and derails the full measure of the patient’s experience.
While we do not leave our subjectivities and identities at the door, a psychoanalyst has learned to manage herself so that she does not intrude into or foreclose on her patient’s experience, and if and when she does, she repairs that rupture in ways that promote greater trust and intimacy. The therapeutic relationship is your interpersonal test kitchen.
So, perhaps we need a psychoanalytic sub-school for those of us who reject politicized, conspiratorial psychoanalysis, much as the British Psychoanalytic Society created its Independents in the 1940’s for members (some of whom remain our most elegant, revered, and evolved psychoanalytic minds to this day) who preferred to stay out of theoretical bickering. The dangers we face today are much worse, because they are politicized, AI slop-laden, and bigotry-driven. That demeans all of us.
The American Independent Group
I informally designate the admixture of my personal moral/philosophical/clinical beliefs, the state’s legal standards regulating my specific scope of practice (LMFT), and its separate code of ethics “The American Independent Group” or “The American Independents.”
As its first and sole practitioner, I am free from doctrinaire pressures and reject any attempt to be coerced to subscribe to or promote any particular political ideology or pass a litmus test for group membership, support, or affiliation. I do not need an endorsement. I will not misuse psychoanalytic theories to promote lies or bigotry.
Whether or not I remain a member of a psychoanalytic Institute as a training and supervising analyst, I will always be a fully certified psychoanalyst having earned a formal degree as a Doctor of Psychology in Psychoanalysis (Psy.D.)
Always independent.
I am here for you. Join me.