I am a psychologist, psychoanalyst, author, and teacher based in Portland, Maine. I work with individual adults and couples as well as offering private consultation and clinical supervision. 

I describe my therapeutic approach as relational with a forward edge. It is grounded in a basic trust in each patient’s healthy strivings toward self- understanding, transformation and growth. I view each therapeutic relationship as a unique and evolving two-person system that ideally moves toward a progressive fittedness between the patient’s evolving therapeutic needs and what I, as analyst, come to offer in response. The ultimate test of the relationship is whether a patient feels like the therapist gets it. (See section on Clinical Philosophy).

While I have written on many topics throughout my career (see Publications), two major lines of inquiry have emerged as primary organizers of my thinking and are represented in my two books: Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing: A Holistic Relational Perspective on the Therapeutic Process (2017); and Airless Worlds and the Restoration of Psychic Breathing: Working Psychoanalytically with Early Relational Trauma (2025). (See Books section for brief descriptions of what these books are about.)

In addition to my private practice and writing, I am a faculty member and training and supervising analyst at various psychoanalytic institutes. I am also Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and Maine Medical Center where I have taught and supervised psychiatry residents (2005-Present).