A licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and author/editor, I received an MSW in 1982 from Yeshiva University—Wurzweiler School of Social Work, a post-masters certificate in 1992 from New Hope Guild—Child and Adolescent Therapy Training Program, and a PhD in 1999 from New York University—Ehrenkranz School of Social Work. Much of my vast professional experience encompasses work in both preventive as well as mental health settings.

Prior to life as a social worker, I did my undergraduate work at Temple University-Esther Boyer College of Music in Philadelphia, and then went on to train as a music therapist at the University of Kansas, working mostly with the developmentally disabled in institutional settings.

In private practice for over nineteen years, I have treated a range of patients with specialties in working with children and adolescents, gay men and lesbians. While the majority of my experience has been individually oriented, I have also done couple therapy with both gay/lesbian as well as heterosexual men and women.

While acquiring deeper insight into what makes you tick and how your past life affects your present is key, putting that knowledge to work is equally as important. Setting realistic, attainable goals, both short- and long-term, is an indispensable part of the therapeutic process. Though I use both psychoanalytic and systems theory to inform my work, for me, the therapeutic relationship remains the cornerstone of treatment. Helping you to understand what goes on between the two of us serves as a model for furthering your understanding of what goes on between you and the other people in your life.

 
 
 
  My first paper, published in the Clinical Social Work Journal, “John: Some Thoughts on Mourning” (1996) is a good, though early example of the ways in which I apply theory to practice and practice to theory. I cover a ten-year period of treatment with a twelve-year-old Chinese boy brought to therapy because of his refusal to attend school four years after the death of his father. The perennial question, “Do Children Mourn?” forms the backdrop to a complex case in which both clinical as well as cultural factors are intertwined and examined in an effort to assess the effect of the loss on the patient’s character.
  
 


An Excerpt:

Viewing all of this from a more clinical perspective, it is obvious that this central drama of John’s childhood and early adolescence has undeniably shaped him. Characterological issues that have become clearer over time revolve around a sense of isolation flowing from both his vulnerability to loss as well as his obsessive need for order, predictability, and control. To what extent these traits were present earlier and/or became further exacerbated by the trauma would be difficult to sort out.

On a deeper level, John’s tendency to isolate himself relates not only to a fear of being engulfed/annihilated but, simultaneously, keeps him protected from engulfing/annihilating others through his neediness. Images abound of himself as being “in a cocoon” or “sealed off behind a barbed-wire fence, alligators roaming the muddy waters of a swampy moat,” ensuring that no one gets inside his world, keeping him enshrined in a kind of coffin-like state. Does this represent a continued, unconscious longing for and/or an identification with his father? his mother?

In session several months ago, John painted this dream-like image:

He imagined himself walking along a city street, observing a party going on inside of a restaurant. Others were eating, drinking, dancing—altogether enjoying themselves. The outside world did not seem to exist for them. As John watched, he was seized with the possibility of going inside. Should he? Shouldn’t he? What if he goes in and no one notices him? Worse yet, what if he goes in and the others let him know that he is not wanted and ask him to leave? What shame! What humiliation! I wondered if he could just go in, look around, then leave if he is not comfortable. After a moment of hesitation, he decides that he cannot. He is resigned to his isolation, his solitariness, his loneliness—for the moment, anyway. Perhaps some other time. He keeps walking.

In describing the dimensions of the schizoid character…Fairbairn (1940) observes that is it a position in which love is thought to be destructive, giving rise “to a compulsion to hate and be hated” while underneath really longing “to love and to be loved” (p. 26). Seinfeld (1991) writes that “there is a consuming need for object dependence but attachment threatens the schizoid with the loss of the self,” seeking protection through “emotional withdrawal and affective isolation” (p. 3). Does John withhold his love from others out of a deep disappointment around the fact that those he most wants to give it to are not available to receive it? Does he feel that it was he, himself, [who] destroyed his parents? And, if his need for love destroyed them, could it destroy others as well?

Despite a long and intense involvement with John and despite my hovering, father-like presence in his life, there remains a kind of formality and distance between us. As Seinfeld (1991) notes, a central counter-transferential pitfall in the work with schizoid patients is the feeling of indifference that become induced by their placing “the neglectful parental image onto the therapist” (p. 195) through projective identification. John treats me similarly to the ways in which he perceives he was treated, i.e., apathetically, indifferently, creating the impression that the environment may not have been good-enough (Winnicott, 1960), especially during times of crisis and tragedy. Allowing himself the experience of being a bit more dependent and closer to me will, hopefully, release him from his defensive need for emotional self-sufficiency. I do feel that this is beginning to evolve as is his capacity to open up to others in ways that are new and terrifying for him. (pp. 280-281)