Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Through psychodynamic psychotherapy, the therapist and client create a relationship to relieve suffering and to enhance the capacity for joy and authentic experiences. We collaborate to identify and then address self-punishing and self-destructive thoughts and feelings. We examine the ways in which these patterns of mind lead to anxiety and isolation. Doing so allows the client to experience feelings that have often been pushed out of awareness for many years. Together, we discover the stories we tell ourselves, stories that may shield us from intimacy and in doing so keep joy at arm’s length. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy encourages clients to weave new life-narratives. These new life-stories permit the client to embrace the wide array of emotions that are integral to any fully-lived life. When we let go of the fear of our own emotions, we can explore the world less hindered by our habitual processes that keep emotions and people at a distance. 

Dr. Jeff Katzman has carried his immersion in psychodynamic psychotherapy to many interests, including parenthood, leadership and organization dynamics, and helping artists and writers to bring characters with psychological depth to life inside of robust fictional worlds. Dr. Katzman is available for individual consultations, ongoing psychodynamic psychotherapy, and therapist supervision.

With limited available hours, he is only able to accept full payment at the time of service, but can provide paperwork for reimbursement from individual insurance plans.

Applied Improvisation

Dr. Katzman has been involved with improvisational theater and its applications in many formats, having studied this for over thirty years. Through improvisational theater, we develop our sense of spontaneity, access our imagination, and learn to collaborate in increasingly playful and productive ways. Working with medical students, psychiatry residents, and experienced psychotherapists, he has learned how clinicians can use improvisation to unscript from their professional demeanor and bring authenticity to their role. At the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, Jeff learned how improvisation can help scientists to deliver and explain the complex research they are doing. He and his team have replicated this work at the University of New Mexico.

He has worked extensively with interdisciplinary leadership groups in hospital organizations, helping them to embrace the sense of spirit inherent in improvisational theater and to use that energy to solve complex problems in the workplace. Dr. Katzman has experienced—whether in an individual consultation setting or in a retreat format—the delight of clients and patients considering and experiencing the process of improvisation as they moved beyond the traditional scripts that had come to define them since they were children. Jeff uses improvisation to focus a consultation, gather information from the participants about their experiences at work, and then provide a focused intervention using experiences of improvisation. These interventions often highlight concepts from his book, Life Unscripted, working to identify scripts that limit work relationships. The consultation and intervention include exercises in collaboration, authenticity, empathy building, accessing our imagination, bringing presence to the moment, and the importance of play at work. Jeff and his team have provided over twenty consultations with teams as small as 8 and as large as 350 – though 20-40 is our best number!

Please contact Jeff for ideas regarding an improvisation consultation.

Systems and Leadership Consultation

Dr. Katzman has twenty years of experience studying and participating in organizational leadership. He has received additional training through the Gallup and Studer organizations and the Arbinger Institute among others. He has studied systems theory through a psychodynamic lens, and has himself served in hospital leadership roles for twenty years. He is able to work with organizational leaders to understand their current role and to assist in developing an understanding of their position in an organization. Similarly, Jeff has worked with many individuals and couples to understand the system of their family and to support the emergence of new roles, capacities, and strengthened relationships.