Mary Sun, MD
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Social psychoanalysis
Many people come in wondering, What is wrong with me, and why hasn’t it gone away? Social psychoanalysis asks a companion question: What were you responding to, and what has responding cost you? Social psychoanalysts engage in the depth work of all psychoanalysis (family origins, dreams, unconscious cycles) while also considering the broader conditions of your life: class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and what you have had to manage that others have not. In a departure from the classical tradition, social psychoanalysis recognizes that most of what shapes a life happens outside the therapy room — and then walks in with you.
Sometimes, what looks like a symptom is an effective response to what your environments have asked of you. The same is true in the therapy room. Where each of us comes from affects how we hear each other, and the ways we miss each other become part of the work. Everyone comes from somewhere. You don’t need any special language to start, just curiosity and a willingness to look.
You begin wherever you want. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is slow by necessity, and requires time and regularity to support its depth. Most people meet with me once or twice a week, and some up to four times. If you are interested in this kind of work, let me know at our initial intake appointment — after learning more about you, I can recommend an initial meeting schedule that fits your goals and your life. Treatment is open-ended, and we continuously reflect on pacing and progress as it unfolds.
I offer a sliding scale for anyone seen more than once a week. Sessions are sixty minutes, in person, by telehealth, or both. Couch optional.
Psychoanalytic work is especially helpful for people who have carried something for a long time. Many of us can name our patterns, and even manage them well, long before we feel them change in our bodies. That shift usually comes through being listened to closely and carefully, over time, by someone whose job is to hear what is underneath. Keeping your social realities in mind makes what we uncover far richer, and keeps the work anchored in your actual life. These ideas are central to relational and interpersonal psychoanalysis, the tradition I’m grounded in and where I continue to train. This approach sees the therapy relationship itself, and the world around it, as an essential part of change.