Major Projects & Areas of Work

Admittedly, my work and background are difficult to categorize.  That’s because of its inter-disciplinary character. As you assess my qualifications to address your organization, and determine if there is match between our interests, you need to review the influences on my work and the results.  They are summarized in the following five items.  Then, contact me so we can discuss your goals for a speaker and determine how I can meet them.

Over the last fifteen years five stories have shaped the heart of my work.  Each has been a platform for for one or ore major projects where I use books, documentary films, and photographic exhibits as media to create narratives that describe my understanding of what has taken place in these communities.

The tools I use in these projects draw directly from what I do in the consulting room with my patients.  Freud’s greatest gift, in my view, was to give us a methodology that allows for the creation of a unique relational space within which people may speak and reflect on their life stories. It is in the clinician’s orientation toward the patient’s narrative and in the subtle and complex ways that psychoanalysis teaches us to engage the life story, that patients’ lives are transformed.

The hallmark of my work is that I have taken that lesson out of the consulting room and into communities where I explore difficult, sometimes traumatizing events. For this reason, I describe my work as “psychoanalytic ethnography.” For more information, click the issue below and you will be able to read more about the projects, the ways in which I have chosen to represent them, and the talks derived from them.

Five Issues that shape my work

1. Veterans Issues

2. Mexican Drug Wars & Community Violence

3. Hate Crimes & Racial Violence

4. Interventions in Communities

5. Immigration, Latino/a Psychology