About Elizabeth

Like many life paths, mine to this place of being a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst has not been straight-forward, and yet in hindsight, at a glance, it rings with a tone of inevitability. Pieces fit, choices cohere into an idiosyncratic amalgam of fields that seems ‘meant to be’ – a destination. But of course, this is a telling of a story that has been worked and reworked. Like all life stories – yours, too – it is best read with a gently questioning, respectfully curious eye. Nothing much is inevitable, and if it seems to be, let’s wonder about how.

I was trained first as an anthropologist, an endeavor that became complicated for me in the course of fieldwork in Central America. I found myself quietly but definitely longing for a different sort of relationship with the people whose cultural lives – the ways and hows and whys of them – I was working to understand. I wanted to enter these lives in a fuller way, beyond a particular intellectual inquiry that seemed to keep us at a distance from each other, with the emotional and psychic realms of life unacknowledged. A basic but insistent idea I heard through my studies was that cultural life operates outside of psychic experience, and this idea did not resonate with me; in my gut, I knew not to believe it.

My grappling with the relationship of culture to psychic life was informed also by a tangle of questions about power. After college, and prior to graduate school in anthropology, I had worked in shelters and on the streets with homeless folks in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Boston and its many outlying towns. I was not yet a Social Worker but was aware of ‘doing’ something like social work, steeped in a world of services and gaps in services, trying to help people on the economic margins build steadier lives against many odds. I both loved the people I came to know and strived to help, and I formed critiques of this professional field too (such as I saw it), one where I tuned into complicated power imbalances between ‘provider’ and ‘client.’ These imbalances seemed to be reinforced by the institutional structures we navigated daily, and this left me uneasy. It was to Anthropology where I brought my questions about the workings of power in helping professions, and there where they multiplied and deepened. When I chose to leave my graduate program in anthropology and turn in earnest to clinical social work, I did so with a commitment to doing my very best as a clinician to honor the complexities of the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘psyche,’ and the ways this relationship is infused always with feelings about power. There are no easy formulations about what this relationship looks like and certainly not in the thick of our messy, everyday lives. But I have been trying hard to see and feel it and to describe what I see and feel throughout my professional life.

I moved from Santa Cruz, California, where I studied anthropology, up to San Francisco and worked at La Familia Counseling Service, a community mental health clinic in the East Bay, as a clinical case manager. In shelters, board and care homes, and family settings, I worked primarily with adults living with schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis, developing strong relationships with my clients about which I could think deeply with a team of other clinicians committed to psychodynamic ideas and practice. We continually worked to stay attuned to the cultural and socioeconomic realities of the mostly working-class Latino community we served. My years at La Familia confirmed for me that the field of clinical social work was already holding in mind my questions regarding ‘culture’ and ‘psyche’ and ‘power,’ and that it would actively nurture them and push them forward.

I entered Smith College School for Social Work and trained at Faulkner Hospital in Boston in inpatient medicine and at Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco in outpatient psychiatry. Both were excellent experiences that steeped me in thinking about the impact of medical illness and physical health on emotional life, the potentials of psychodynamic psychotherapy, and the ways we navigate our cultural lives in clinical work. After social work school, I worked providing psychotherapy and other clinical services to guests at Long Island Shelter in Boston (at the time, one of the city’s largest homeless shelters), as a clinical social worker at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in both inpatient medicine and outpatient primary care, and as a psychotherapist at North End Waterfront Health, a community health center in Boston. I also trained specifically in psychodynamic psychotherapy at the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy through a two-year clinical fellowship and began a private practice. Seeking a more thorough immersion in insight-oriented and depth psychotherapy, I eventually completed training at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis to become a psychoanalyst.

The theories and practice of contemporary psychoanalysis, pushed to their best, offer a space to honor and deepen the complexities of the relationships among culture, psychic life, and power. Psychoanalysis urges us to rethink what has felt inevitable about our lives and the world, what seems obvious and certain at the outset. In analysis, we are reminded of the presence of the unconscious – yours, mine, a ‘normative cultural unconscious’ – where there is something about how we feel and think and act that lives outside of our immediate awareness. The analytic process can help us learn new ways to tune into, remember, and know more clearly these feelings and thoughts, and how they lead us to behave in the ways we do, both in relationship with ourselves and in our relationships with others. This endeavor is powerful; it has the potential to heal the wounds of old hurts and unbind us.  Ideally, we may live more freely, with a real sense of meaning and fulfillment.

Pushed to its best, I hope what I’ve sketched out here, and what I continue to make of it, can help you with the struggles, fears, and wishes you bring to your therapy. I believe what I cull from these experiences has a good bit to offer – a starting point and guiding mindset for deeply engaged therapeutic work.