Suzanne Rosenfeld

Dr. Rosenfeld grew up in Canada and lived as an adult in the U.S., Israel, and France. She trained as a medical doctor at Tel Aviv University and as a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago. Following on at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute she became a psychoanalyst and faculty member. As a postgraduate she spent three years in Paris, France to develop her interests in French psychoanalysis, psychosomatics, language and culture. She received a “Competent and Talented” award for a project disseminating analytic ideas in France and in the US. Living abroad she learned how different cultures shape the internal experiences of a person and how learning from “the analytic Other” can create new “forms of perceptions” or theories in the analyst. Using this knowledge from abroad and in Chicago during multiple trainings, she developed a way of working with patients who suffer from bodily ills that impact the mind. This “somato-psychic logic,” reveals and studies the free associative process and develops the work of Christopher Bollas whose ideas are original and have on the ground use for all practitioners of mental health. This field has wider application for those interested in freeing the body from strangulated feelings or disabled perceptions. Throughout her career she dedicated her clinical practice to introducing patients to their unconscious minds and creativity: “The analytic space holds potential for generating more meaning, truth, and freedom in a person’s life through unity of psyche-soma and tranformation of the life of the mind.” In her practice she sees mental health practitioners and persons in the arts, politics, entrepreneurship, law, medicine and education. Her research and teaching interests include psychoanalytic assessment, psychosomatics and free association. For the last several years she runs a clinical group and teaches “Assessment: How to help a person enter a psychoanalysis with oneself.”