Professional History

Having previously been involved with Law and Human Rights campaigning, I began my therapeutic career some 30 years ago, when I set up one of the first fertility counselling services in the NHS.

 

While remaining a strand of my clinical work and intellectual interest, my work has always been general psychotherapy with individuals and couples.

 

I went on to train as an Existential-Phenomenological Psychotherapist an approach which powerfully reflects my understanding of the struggles and challenges we all encounter throughout our lives, Over the years, the work of Martin Buber, Victor Frankl, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and R. D. Laing have offered particular inspiration and stimulation.

 

Canadian and Jewish by birth, I have also developed a professional interest in a wide range of experiences of marginality, and minority experience, with a strong element of intercultural work in my practice.

 

My workshop, A Stranger in a Strange Land, speaks to the experience of ‘otherness’ or ‘foreignness’ that many feel, and has run successfully in Canada and England for the past 20 years.

 

Currently my private practice with individuals and couples encompasses everything around the challenges we face as humans trying to live as best we can, and make sense of the experience.

 

In addition, I have been involved with the teaching and mentoring of trainees at all levels of training over the last twenty five years, at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regents University, Surrey University and most recently, the Minster Centre.

 

My writing spans a range of topics, much of it written in collaboration, as the book Cradling the Chrysalis: Teaching and Learning Psychotherapy (revised  ed), which I wrote together with my friend and colleague, Mary MacCallum Sullivan. In fact, I would say that collaboration is a hallmark of my work, whether it be with a client in the consulting room, a colleague in the training process, or a fellow author.