Learning from experience
I graduated from Loyola School of Social Work in 2020, having completed a field placement in South Side Chicago Public Schools through the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.
I dedicated a combined 15 years to advanced clinical training, between the Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, a UK-based disability psychotherapy training program for independent practitioners led by Dr. Pat Frankish, the Infant and Young Child Observation program at the International Psychotherapy Institute, Introduction to Counseling and Psychotherapy through the Tavistock and Portman, Introductory Lectures with the British Institute of Psychoanalysis, and fellowships held at the New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center (2013-2014), and the Baltimore-Washington Center for Psychoanalysis (2023-2024).
My practice began as a participant-observer reflecting on everyday life, group dynamics, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma in Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans. I continued this role in residential settings for people with disabilities in the Midwest, witnessing the effects of group homes on the mental wellbeing of individuals in care who did not have access to psychotherapy that could do justice to their inner worlds.
I went on to work at historically significant therapeutic schools including the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago (the legacy of Bruno Bettelheim), and the Hanna Perkins Center in Cleveland, Ohio (affiliated with Anna Freud), where I served as a consultant to a daycare at a Central Cleveland housing project.
I continue to do outreach work in Baltimore City Public Schools, reflecting on Donald Meltzer’s psychoanalytic model of the person-in-environment and The Educational Role of the Family, the focus of an independent research project I began at the archives of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, just before the pandemic.
My approach is informed by international perspectives on child psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, including research on the conceptual history and social relations of science, moving practice forward. This foundation has led me to do innovative work incorporating affinities like Minecraft into sessions with children on the autism spectrum. I have presented my work nationally and internationally, and am on the faculty at the International Psychotherapy Institute, where I teach Infant Observation.