About Jay’s Practice
I describe my practice as a “patchwork quilt” of interests, including individual therapy with adults and adolescents, couples therapy, and diagnostic testing, mostly for learning and attention disorders. I am consulting psychologist at Roycemore School, a Jr. K-12th grade private school in Evanston. Some clients consult with me for personal or professional reasons that are not therapy as such, and I just call them personal or professional consultations. Some clients are high school, college or university students who need help getting through school, because of learning and/or attention issues, as well as therapy.
As an undergraduate I was interested in consciousness, both as studied through experience and as studied through brain science. Eventually I had to choose one direction or another, and chose therapy, since experience-based methods seemed more applicable to the challenges of living that interested me most. Later, I got involved in vocational rehabilitation of adults with all kinds of disabilities, and still later became very involved in working with children and adults with learning and attention disorders, which led to developing a specialization in neurocognitive diagnostic testing. In the process, I came to understand something of how therapy and experiential learning works in terms of brain structure and function. So my once divided interests have come together in the fullness of time.
I think we have resources for psychological self-management which are often not developed in the various cultures--family, community, school, religious, national, professional--in which we grow up. These resources can be accessed and developed in various ways, of which therapy (and personal and professional consultation) is one. My approach to therapy is about increasing the reflective, perceptive and executive functions of the mind, that are mainly associated with the frontal lobes of the brain, through a particular kind of relationship focusing on conversation about issues of meaning in one’s life.
An older-fashioned, but still valid, way of saying this is that understanding leads to wisdom.
I’ve come to see that there are many different ways to go about doing therapy, and that each therapist ends up collecting and integrating his (or her) own preferred methods; which, combined with each therapist’s particular and unique personality, turn into each therapist’s particular style. That means that the question is not so much, “Is this therapist a good therapist?” as, “Is this therapist a good therapist for this patient (or client), at this time?” The match between therapist and client is crucial to the success of therapy, and no therapist is a good therapist for all clients. This attitude goes counter to the attitude on which much therapy training is based, which is that there are schools of theory and method, and one school is better than another. I think that a knowledge of schools and methods is important, and that different clients (or the same client at different times) can benefit from different approaches, but, at the end of the day, the personality and values of the therapist, and how they interact with the personality and values of the client, are what accounts for most of the value of the therapeutic relationship.
When I was young and just starting out to become a therapist, I thought that every therapy treatment should be able to be completed within a year. Now, I feel that each person’s therapy takes as much time as it takes. Some therapies are over in a few weeks or months, while others may have only just begun, in important ways, after a year or even more time has passed. When I was young, I was skeptical about what psychological tests could tell about an individual. Now, I am still skeptical, but I have learned that testing, combined with interviewing in a careful investigation, can tell a lot, as long as everyone involved is willing to put in as much time as it takes to find out what there is to be found out through those methods.
So, I’m not trying to provide quick fixes in therapy or quick diagnoses in testing, although I do try to add value to each session. I think that this makes for a much more comfortable, and, in the long run, effective, working relationship. Because of this recognition of the importance of taking as much time as necessary in therapy and diagnostic evaluation, I no longer accept any third party (insurance) reimbursement. My clients pay me directly and submit my bills to their insurers if they choose to.
Roger Sperry, the pioneering Nobel laureate psychobiologist, made my favorite statement about consciousness, while considering it in the context of evolution. Sperry saw consciousness as the pinnacle achievement of evolution, and the human brain as conferring a unique capacity for a “top-down reorganization of life.” I understand Sperry’s use of the “top-down” metaphor in more ways than one. Chronologically, we canlook back in time to make new sense out of what we’ve experienced. In the physical brain, the frontal (and prefrontal) lobes, seat of executive functions, are situated above the emotional centers which are lower and more centrally located within the brain.
European culture often contrasted emotion and intellect, seeing intellect as superior to emotion. The result was a lopsided view of human potential that both generated great scientific, technical and commercial achievements, and brought international colonization and World Wars I and II down upon humanity. Modern brain science allows us to understand the contrast as not between intellect and emotion, but as between the capacity of the brain to develop and harmonize its executive and emotional functions, including both perception and analysis, on the one hand, and various disintegrated states of being in which emotion, belief, and intellectualization compete with one another for control of the fragmentary and disjointed mind. Success in life, for the individual human being and for humanity as a whole, depends on harmonizing the “whole ball of wax”--the mind-brain. That is the path we have to travel.
Before closing, several additional interests of mine are worth mentioning, because they often come up in my work. First, as an artist (a songwriter-guitarist-singer), I am interested in artistic creativity as an important part of life for people with natural artistic inclination (my first CD is available at www.guitaratlarge.com, and I’m at work on a second). Second, my interest in the psychological side of spirituality finds a place in my conversations with some clients. Third, as a businessperson, I am interested in helping clients find their economic way. Fourth, as an educator, I am interested in understanding the array of individual learning styles, and in helping my clients to find ways to understand and maximize their own. When they are teachers, supervisors, or therapists, I try to support them in their work with others. Fifth, I am interested in organizational dynamics and leadership, and in the different ways one can add value to organizations one works in or belongs to. And, of course, I am endlessly interested in the infinite nuances of individual and family relationships.
My office is at 1939 Central Street, Evanston, Illinois 60201, telephone 847.491.1191.
