Psychoanalysis, ARt Therapy
& Mental Health Counseling
EASTCHESTER & VIRTUAL IN NEW YORK & FLORIDA
The body as battleground
When suffering organizes around the body, the body becomes a battleground. Agony around dependency, shame, desire, control, visibility, longing, aggression, vulnerability, or identity are lived rather than spoken. Food, weight, appearance, illness, pain, compulsive behaviors, bodily rituals, or preoccupations can begin to carry meanings that exceed conscious awareness. Symptoms that may appear irrational or self-destructive from the outside often represent deeply intelligent attempts at adaptation, protection, communication, or survival.
Many of the people Kathryn works with describe feeling trapped in cycles that simultaneously soothe and torment them: restricting yet obsessing over food, pursuing unattainable bodily ideals, dissociating from hunger, compulsively seeking relief, feeling alienated from their bodies, or becoming consumed by shame and self-surveillance. Often, there is a painful sense that nothing is ever enough: thin enough, attractive enough, safe enough, soothed enough, loved enough.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, symptoms are not viewed merely as behaviors to extinguish, but as expressions of emotional life that deserve curiosity and careful listening. Bodies can become sites of reenactment when experiences of need, dependency, trauma, humiliation, deprivation, or relational unsafety have not been fully metabolized psychologically. What cannot yet be symbolized may instead emerge through appetite, flesh, pain, exhaustion, compulsivity, dysphoria, or attempts at bodily control.
Kathryn is particularly interested in working with adults struggling with eating disorders, chronic dieting, binge eating, compulsive exercise, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, chronic pain and illness, health anxiety, somatization, and complicated relationships to embodiment and self-image. She also works with individuals who feel psychologically “stuck” despite being highly insightful, reflective, or intellectually sophisticated.
Kathryn’s clinical approach is informed by interpersonal-relational psychoanalysis, which understands emotional suffering as shaped within relationships rather than existing in isolation inside the individual. She is currently enrolled in an advanced psychoanalytic training program at the William Alanson White Institute focused on eating disorders, compulsions, and addictions. This work explores the ways experiences of longing, shame, trauma, and unmet relational needs can become enacted through the body and through compulsive patterns organized around desire, deprivation, control, and self-punishment.
Therapy, as Kathryn understands it, is not about forcing compliance with norms of health, productivity, beauty, or identity. Nor is it about reducing the complexity of suffering to symptom management alone. Analytic work creates space to think more deeply about what a symptom may protect against, what it may communicate, and what possibilities might emerge if previously unbearable feelings no longer need to be carried by the body alone.
Over time, this can make possible a different relationship to wanting, to dependency, to embodiment, and to other people — one that feels less governed by shame, compulsion, or psychic survival, and more capable of genuine aliveness, freedom, and relational nourishment.
