Integrative psychotherapy
at the interface of anthropology and psychoanalysis
About Kate
I am a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and medical anthropologist/bioethicist with over twenty five years of clinical experience in the University of Chicago community and internationally. (Please note that as of 2022 I will also be practicing in Northampton, MA.)
My work is psychoanalytic, which means I attend to both conscious and unconscious motivation in people's difficulties in living fully, creatively, and freely. In exploring your challenges with you and interpreting these in relation to your history, your strengths, your hopes, your conflicts, and your latent transformational potentials, I aim to help you develop a stronger, fuller, richer integration of personality, untangling knots, filling in gaps, releasing energy and imagination.
I did my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where I trained in both psychological and medical anthropology and bioethics. I’m also a University of Chicago-trained clinical social worker with advanced post-graduate training and certification in psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapy, and cognitive-behavioral therapy. I work with individuals, couples, and families and maintain a private psychotherapy/psychoanalysis and consultation practice in downtown Chicago, Hyde Park, and, beginning in 2022, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
In addition, I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Rush Medical College, a faculty member at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, and a clinical supervisor in the Psychiatry residency at UMass Chan Medical School/Baystate. Over the past twenty years, I have been a Senior Fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and have served on the faculty of the Institute for Clinical Social Work as Chair of Conceptual Foundations and as a member of the IRB, and have lectured widely and taught numerous courses at Rush, at Loyola University Chicago, and at the University of Chicago, where I have also been a Field Instructor and Faculty Field Partner in the School of Social Service Administration. I Direct the Chicago Center for Contemporary Psychotherapy, where we train and supervise post-graduate clinical fellows in the practice of relational psychotherapy, and I am the author of the award-winning 2014 book from Duke University Press, Illusions of a Future: Psychoanalysis and the Biopolitics of Desire, a historical ethnography of psychoanalysis in the United States.
Services
Psychotherapy
Psychoanalysis
Clinical Supervision
Before making a recommendation for therapy, I typically conduct a 2-3 session assessment in which we will explore your concerns, difficulties, and symptoms in an extended, far-reaching way. We will talk about your psychological history as well as your familial and cultural background, your change efforts to date, your goals, and any obstacles — external/situational or internal/intrapsychic — to your meeting your goals. The treatment I will recommend will be unique to your personal cognitive/emotional/symbolic style and imaginative resources, and I'll present my rationale so that we can discuss the plan and our mutual expectations — type of therapy, frequency of sessions, duration of treatment, etc. — before we embark.
For the most part psychotherapy is conducted at a frequency of 1-2 weekly sessions, while psychoanalysis is conducted at a frequency of 3-4 weekly sessions and involves a deeper, fuller exploration of your inner life (including fantasies, dreams, transference derivatives, imagery, and endopsychic experience) and your outer integration.
I am also available to provide psychodynamic clinical supervision, both in my office and remotely by telephone or Zoom, and I am committed to providing a meaningful therapeutic or clinical learning experience that is fully confidential and durably protected from third party interference.