Therapy for psychoanalysts, a space where you are not the analyst
Confidential therapy for psychoanalysts and analytic candidates in New York, offered by a clinician who speaks the language of the unconscious but sits outside your institute, your referral circle and your lineage.
You have spent years on the couch and behind it, and you know the value of speaking freely. Yet analysts can find themselves without a place to bring their own exhaustion, health, grief or doubt. I offer psychotherapy and integrative psychiatric care that is explicitly not supervision and not analysis: a room informed by psychoanalytic inquiry, including Lacanian thought, where somatic experience and, when relevant, medication can also be considered.
“The analyst is trained to hold their own speech in reserve. Somewhere, that speech has to go.”
This is not a return to your training analysis or a supervisory consultation. It is a place for you, as a person, with whatever you bring.
The particular solitude of analytic work
Analytic listening asks for a rare kind of abstinence: hours of attention in which your own reactions are noticed, metabolised and largely kept silent.
Psychoanalysts tend to know themselves well, often after long personal analyses. That knowledge does not make you immune to depletion, illness, loss or a crisis of conviction. If anything, the expectation that you should be able to analyse your way through your own difficulties can make it harder to ask for help. Some analysts feel that returning to treatment would be an admission of failure. I see it as consistent with everything the discipline values.
The analytic world in New York is small and interconnected. Your former analyst may be a colleague, your supervisees may sit on the same committees, and referrals travel through familiar networks. That can make it difficult to find someone you can speak to without the conversation echoing back. As an integrative psychiatric nurse practitioner whose thinking is shaped by psychoanalytic inquiry, I sit adjacent to that world rather than inside its institutions, which many analysts find freeing.
Therapy for psychoanalysts with me does not ask you to abandon your framework. We can speak about the unconscious, repetition, desire and the signifier as naturally as about sleep, appetite and heart rate. What I add is attention to the body and, where it is useful, psychiatric expertise, two areas that analytic training sometimes leaves at the edge of the frame.
Not supervision, not analysis
Our sessions are not a place to discuss your cases in a supervisory way, and they are not a continuation of a training analysis with its institutional stakes. Your patients may of course come up, because they live in your mind, but the focus is on what is happening for you. That distinction matters, and we hold it together. It allows you to arrive without a professional agenda and simply speak.
The body in the consulting room
Years of sitting still, absorbing projections and holding the transference leave traces in the body: tension, fatigue, disrupted sleep, a sense of being saturated. Somatic exploration offers a complementary route to what words cannot fully reach. For analysts used to working almost entirely through speech, attending to sensation can feel unfamiliar at first and then surprisingly restorative.
Psychiatric medication within an analytic sensibility
Analytic culture has sometimes regarded medication with suspicion, as if it might foreclose meaning. I do not share that view, nor do I assume medication is the answer. If depression, anxiety or sleep disturbance is weighing on you, we can think together, carefully and without prejudice, about whether medication has a place, and if so, how to introduce it gradually and with close review.
When the listener needs listening to
Analysts come to me at many points: during candidacy, in the busy middle years of practice, around retirement, or after a personal loss. Sometimes the reason is clear; sometimes it is a vague sense that the work has become heavier or that something unspoken is accumulating. Either is a reasonable place to begin.
- Saturation after years of listening
- Doubts about the analytic vocation
- Strain within institute politics
- Complicated feelings about your own analyst
- Grief, illness or a major life event
- Physical tension from long sessions
- Low mood you cannot analyse away
- Questions about trying medication
- Planning the end of your practice
Psychoanalytic depth, integrative breadth
I meet analysts on familiar ground and then widen the frame. Conversation remains central, but it sits alongside attention to the body, the practical conditions of your life and, where relevant, psychiatric care, all held within one confidential relationship.
Psychoanalytic inquiry
We can work with dreams, slips, repetitions and the structure of your desire. Informed by psychoanalytic and Lacanian thought, I listen for what is said between the lines, while keeping the frame flexible enough to address present-day concerns directly.
Somatic exploration
Gentle attention to breath, posture and sensation helps release what accumulates over thousands of hours of sitting and listening. It also opens another register of knowing, alongside the verbal one you already know so well.
Feminist and cultural perspectives
Psychoanalysis has a complicated history around gender, sexuality and power. My grounding in feminist philosophy and gender theory allows us to question inherited frameworks critically, including the ones that shape how you see yourself as an analyst.
Integrative psychiatry
When symptoms warrant it, I can assess, diagnose and prescribe. We approach any medication as part of the meaning of your treatment rather than a substitute for it, starting gradually and adjusting only in close conversation with you.
Discretion and boundaries
I take particular care with confidentiality and dual relationships. If our professional circles overlap in any way, we discuss it openly at the outset so that you can feel secure about what is said in the room.
Rest and the life outside
Analysts often keep long, evening-heavy schedules. We look at sleep, recovery, relationships and pleasure, the parts of life that analytic work can quietly crowd out, and consider what would make your practice more sustainable.
What this is, and what it is not
Holding the frame clearly helps you use the space fully.
Not this
- Case supervision or consultation
- A second training analysis
- An evaluation for your institute
- Peer discussion of technique
- A setting where you must perform competence
This
- Confidential therapy for you as a person
- Room for the body as well as speech
- Psychiatric assessment if needed
- Space outside your professional network
- Somewhere to be uncertain
Entering the work on your terms
A clear beginning that respects your experience and your need for discretion.
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1
Free consultation 15 minutes
A brief, confidential call in which we check for any professional overlap, discuss what you are looking for and clarify the frame. You can ask about my orientation and training as directly as you would wish.
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An opening session
Our first full session gives us time to hear your history, your relationship to analysis, your health and what prompted you to reach out now. I may ask practical clinical questions alongside more associative ones.
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3
Continuing the work
We meet in 60 or 90-minute sessions at a frequency that suits you. The longer session is unusual in analytic culture and many analysts find it allows a different kind of thinking to emerge.
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Reviewing the frame
Periodically we reflect on how the work is going and whether the frame still fits. If medication is part of your care, adjustments are discussed together and made gradually, never in haste.
Francesca Rome-Marie, PMHNP-BC
I bring together psychiatry, psychotherapy, somatic work and whole-body health, informed by years in primary care and further study in gender theory, feminist thought, culture and visual art.
I keep a deliberately small caseload so that every client receives consistent, unhurried and genuinely attentive care, held within one relationship rather than split across several providers.
Clear, upfront rates
I don't accept insurance. Modern Holistic Psychiatry is an out-of-network provider, so sessions are paid for directly. Depending on your plan, you may be able to claim reimbursement through your out-of-network benefits.
Find out how much your insurance may coverNeed urgent support? If you're in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or call 911.
Therapy for Psychoanalysts FAQs
Is this a form of psychoanalysis?
Not in the formal sense. I am informed by psychoanalytic inquiry, including Lacanian thought, and I listen in a way you will recognise. However, the work is integrative: we may also attend to the body, to practical aspects of your life and, if needed, to psychiatric medication. For many analysts that broader frame is exactly what they are looking for after years inside a single method.
I have already had a long training analysis. Why would I need therapy now?
A training analysis takes place at a particular moment, often within institutional expectations, and life keeps happening afterwards. Illness, loss, ageing, changes in your practice and the cumulative weight of analytic listening can all raise new questions. Returning to treatment is not a sign that your analysis failed; it reflects the analytic idea that the work of knowing oneself is never finished.
How do you protect confidentiality in such a small professional world?
I work independently, outside the training institutes, and I keep a small caseload by design. At our first conversation we check for any overlapping relationships and decide together how to handle them. I do not discuss clients with colleagues, and nothing is shared without your consent, except in the rare legal circumstances I explain clearly from the outset.
Can we talk about my patients?
Your patients will inevitably appear in what you bring, because they occupy your mind and affect you. We will talk about how the work lands in you, your feelings and your fatigue. What we will not do is case supervision or technical consultation. If you need that, it is better held elsewhere, and keeping the two separate protects the space for your own experience.
I am wary of medication. Will you push it?
No. I respect the analytic concern that medication can be used to shut down meaning, and I never treat it as a default. If we do discuss it, it is because symptoms such as persistent low mood, anxiety or insomnia are getting in the way of your life. We weigh the options together, and any medication is introduced slowly, monitored carefully and remains entirely your choice.
Do you work with candidates still in training?
Yes. Candidacy can be a demanding and exposing period, combining personal analysis, supervision, coursework and early clinical work, often alongside another career or family responsibilities. Some candidates want a space outside the institute to process what training is stirring up. We would discuss carefully how that fits with your institute's requirements and your existing analysis.
A room for your own speech
If you have been holding things for others for a long time, a free 15-minute consultation is a quiet way to explore whether this space could be yours.