I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and psychoanalytic psychotherapist practicing in Greenwich Village, New York City. My clinical work with adults and adolescents reflects my longstanding interest in the complexity of human experience, particularly the ways we become caught in patterns of thought, feeling, and relating that are difficult to understand or change.
I work with people across a broad range of psychological difficulties, including those whose experiences may not fit neatly into familiar diagnostic categories. This may include depression, anxiety, obsessions, addictions, and trauma, as well as challenges involving relationships, sexuality, and intimacy. I have a particular interest in working with people experiencing profound disturbances in their relationships, identities, and sense of themselves or the world around them, including those suffering from personality difficulties, severe mental illness, and other complex or persistent forms of psychological distress.
I approach treatment with the understanding that there is often more to our suffering than we consciously know. Rather than beginning with a predetermined idea of who someone is or what they ought to become, I am interested in discovering, together, something of the particular emotional life that has brought them into treatment.
Psychoanalytic work can be challenging, sometimes surprising, and often deeply relieving. It asks us to become curious about aspects of ourselves we may have spent much of our lives trying not to know.
Alongside my clinical practice, my research interests include psychoanalytic theory, work on unconscious identifications, violence and aggression, and the relationship between individual and collective psychological life. I continue to publish and present my work internationally and maintain an ongoing involvement in psychoanalytic education, training, and scholarship.
Education
2016 Parnell Institute for EMDR
2014 Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program
2013 Rutgers
2012 Princeton
2003 Bethel University
Publications
2026 The Sameness We Cannot Accept: A Framework for Understanding Individual, Communal, and Insititutional Identity and
Violence. de Vries, I. (2026). The sameness we cannot accept. Aisthesis, 21(1), 53–70. https://doi.org/10.7413/2035-8466079
Professional Presentations
2026 Jacques Lacan and René Girard on Fashion, Drag, and Violence. Fashion and Psychoanalysis. New York, New York.
2025 How To Sacrifice A Mind: Working with Aggression and Mimesis in Psychosis. Spirituality, Religion, and the
Sacred. Colloquium on Violence and Religion. Rome, Italy.
2024 The Sameness We Cannot Tolerate. Identifications Performing Counter Discrimination. Universita Ca Foscari
Venezia, Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali. Venice, Italy.
2023 Playing for Real: a single case study of a transgender child. Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program,
Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York, NY.
2017 Featured on First Time Long Time podcast with Aaron Wolfe.
2016 Intersubjectivity, Desire, and the Mimetic Brain: Girard and Psychoanalysis. Cambridge University, London,
UK.
2014 Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
Professional Affiliations
2014 International Psychoanalytic Association
2013 American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work
2013 National Association of Social Workers