I am a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Since 1982, I have worked with adults individually and in couples both intensively and in brief psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I also treat adolescents and their families.

My Ph.D. is from the Clinical Psychology Program at Columbia University (1981), and I have completed postdoctoral training at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy (1986) and at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (1997), where I am now on the faculty.

Although I treat people with a wide range of difficulties in living, I have developed two specific interests in the course of my career. The first is in survivors of massive psychic trauma. When I was writing my dissertation in the late seventies, I joined a congressionally mandated team that had undertaken an epidemiological study of Vietnam veterans. I was particularly interested in what had caused the psychological breakdown of so many veterans on their return home, and I wanted to understand this Post Vietnam Syndrome, as we then called it.

My findings were so unexpected that they led to a career of treating survivors of catastrophes, and to writing and teaching about the psychodynamic causes and consequences of adult onset trauma, a topic that had been largely ignored by psychoanalysis for much of its history. These findings are recorded in my book, Wounded By Reality

As an immigrant myself, I am also particularly interested in working with people who are facing cross-cultural dilemmas. Whether they have come to this country by choice or whether the decision was made out of necessity, immigrants find that the consequences of having been uprooted play a crucial role in their lives and in the lives of their children. Psychodynamic therapy provides an excellent container in which these issues can be explored.

To contact me ghislaine242@gmail.com