Professional Experience and Training

As a psychiatrist, I have been fortunate to participate in the evolution of this complex and exciting field. My career began in Medical School at the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. Interested in literature, I attended lectures offered to medical students by two inspiring psychoanalysts who were able to convey some understanding of the intricacies of the human mind as captured by major works of literature. At that time it became clear to me that I wanted to be a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.

After graduating, I moved to Topeka, Kansas where I completed a residency in dynamic psychiatry, as well as psychoanalytic training, both at the Menninger Foundation. In the sixties and seventies, the Menninger Foundation was a cauldron of intellectual activity. There I had the opportunity to participate in the initial development of group and family therapy, and study gestalt theory, transactional analysis, and systems theory. This eclecticism did not prevent me from maintaining a focus on classical psychoanalysis as it evolved from ego psychology to object relations, self psychology, attachment theory and mentalizing.

Throughout many years of practice I have treated individuals, groups and families. I have also been an active teacher of medical students, psychiatric residents, child psychiatry fellows, psychoanalytic candidates, and other professionals working in mental health. During the last decade of my full-time practice I was an Associate Professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. The human predicament of the cancer patient, the family, and the caregivers provided a field in which I was able to contribute my expertise to assisting patients during these troubled times. I developed techniques for working with patients and their families, and I organized programs to train medical professionals, mental health workers and paraprofessionals. Since leaving MD Anderson I have continued to work on a part-time basis at a local community clinic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I assess and treat children, adolescents and adults.