The whole purpose of being together with other people in a room is to have thinking move somewhere. That is when you feel most alive in your life, when your thinking moves. ‍ ‍
—Anne Carson, in an interview‍ ‍

I practice a form of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a shared investigation into your emotional and mental and imaginative life that hopes to clarify and strengthen your stance toward your self, your own experience, and your world.

I think of the process of therapy in a similar way to what artists have familiarly called “finding a voice,” a growing confidence and pleasure in recognizing that your own communication is becoming fuller and more resonant with the strains of your unique experience, and the discovery that, as the poet Seamus Heaney puts it, “your words have the feel of you about them.”

It seems obvious, but perhaps still useful, to point out that therapy is primarily a conversation, or an effort to find a conversation (or not to find it), between two or more people who are together in a room, or in different rooms, on a phone or a screen.  What the conversation in reality is, what it does or doesn’t do, is difficult to define. And trying to understand what it is can be a meaningful part of the enterprise.  

With children, the conversation mostly occurs through play.

It does seem safe to say that, at the very least, we usually hope the conversation will be worthwhile, that it will help us to feel differently, present us with new possibilities, new perspectives, and afford us a little more freedom to live the way we would like. That what we say to each other over the course of a therapy will lead to a better kind of self-experience, a chance at greater enjoyment, and let us think new thoughts.

And so we agree to meet and talk privately, one stranger to another.

And wonder why.