I offer consultation and treatment to adults of all ages. I specialize in using psychotherapy and psychoanalysis – a form of highly individualized and intensive psychotherapy– to help my patients get to the bottom of what’s brought them to treatment. I consider the relationship between patient and therapist the most powerful tool available to catalyze healing and growth. I help my patients learn to use the here-and-now unfolding of the treatment relationship to bring a new attention to familiar patterns and emotional challenges, so that more satisfying solutions to life’s many problems might be explored. Emotional growth and change, though yearned for, can be immensely frightening and painful to realize and often require a significant amount of support to achieve. I accompany my patients on courageous journeys toward finding authentic voices, tolerating painful realities, and building lives that are gratifying, creative and enlivened. My approach to treatment is sensitive to the disruptive impact of trauma on the developing personality – including often-ongoing social and culturally produced harms. I have special expertise and interest in working with people who occupy intersecting, marginalized identities including LGBTQ and BIPOC people, as well as others who are curious about how culture shapes experience and impacts mental life. I treat a wide range of concerns including problems with anxiety and mood, difficulties with intimacy and relationships, PTSD and complex forms of developmental trauma, challenging stage-of-life transitions, loss and bereavement, concerns regarding sexuality and gender, as well as other problems with adaptation to stressful circumstances. As a psychiatrist, I am an expert in the medical evaluation of mental health conditions and can recommend a range of medical or biologically oriented treatments where appropriate.I provide consultation to those in helping professions who are interested in integrating psychoanalytic concepts and formulation into their work in a diversity of practice settings. My work and life present me with endless opportunities for my own ongoing growth and I am deeply involved in practices of personal and professional development including as a Candidate Psychoanalyst at San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
Board Certification
Board Certified in Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
Education and Training
Adult Psychoanalytic Training Program at SFCP (ongoing)
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at SFCP
Adult Psychiatry Residency Training at UCSF
Chief Resident at the San Francisco VA Medical Center
MD, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
BA in Gender and Sexuality Studies, summa cum laude, New York University
Professional Memberships
San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
Honors and Awards
Laughlin Family Foundation Award
Election to Alpha Omega Alpha
Election to the Charles G. Watson Chapter of the Arnold P. Gold Humanism Honor Society
Gender and Sexuality Academic Achievement Award, NYU
Election to Phi Beta Kappa
