I am a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan where I provide individual psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, professional supervision, and writing consultations, as well as support with creative and writing blocks. I have been practicing, teaching, and supervising psychotherapy with people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures for over 25 years.
I am on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, where I am Co-Director of the One Year Program in Relational Studies. I’m Visiting Faculty and Supervisor at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and Clinical Supervisor at the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia and the City University Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology.
I am also Joint-Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives. I have published numerous articles about trauma, resilience, and creativity, and I teach and present both nationally and internationally.
My new book, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis was published in April 2023 in the Routledge Relational Perspectives Book Series. It explores the transformational power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis; the power of stories to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma.
In this book, I consider the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one’s own intelligible story, resonant with both personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. I see creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. I utilize film, dance, poetry, literature and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, I’m interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets left out of the narrative, the gaps and holes; what gets disavowed, dissociated, and disrupted by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. I’m concerned, as well, with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help people reclaim their memory and creative agency and become the storyteller of their own lives, is at the heart of this volume.
To read endorsements by Jody Davies, Galit Atlas, Adrienne Harris, Michelle Stephens, Ken Corbett, and Steve Tuber or to order a copy, please use this link: https://www.routledge.com/Risking-Intimacy-and-Creative-Transformation-in Psychoanalysis/Levine/p/book/9781032434742.
Book Review by Dr. Sandra Buechler: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HXWCPNMVKVKACJKRXYJP/full?target=10.1080/24720038.2024.2312894