Bios/Staff

Chris is a senior partner and Clinical Director at Village Counseling and Licensed Clinical Social Work Services PLLC (Village Counseling) in NYC and has been in clinical practice for over 30 years. He is a Group Analyst and Certified Couples Therapist with a specialty in training individual, couple and group therapists. Chris is currently on the faculty of the Derner Institute’s Post Graduate Program in Couple Therapy at Adelphi University and the Training Institute for Mental Health, NYC. He also has served as a faculty member as well as the Associate Director of the Psychoanalytic Society & Institute’s Group Therapy Program, NYC, where he currently sits on the Board of its Alumni Association GTAA. He was an adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology and has lectured on empathy at Summer Principal’s Academy, Teachers College, Columbia University. His course “Finding the WE Space,” is a post graduate level program designed to help student therapists develop their empathy skills. He has also developed “The Empathic Classroom” a customized program for Teachers and K-7 students.

Notable publications and presentations include:

Sustained Empathic Focus and the creation of a We Space revisited in light of recent findings in neurobiology
Co-authored with Martin Livingston PhD., published in 2017 in the International Journal of Group Psychotherapy. 

Deconstructing Empathy and Creating a We Space in Group Therapy
Published 2016 in GROUP, the Journal of the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society.

Being Human Together: Empathy Revisited
Academic paper presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the International Association of Analytic Self Psychology, Chicago, Ill.

Lars and the Real Girl—An Intersubjective Systems Perspective
Presented at Training Institute for Mental Health Seminar, ‘Working with Delusion, Fantasy, Hope, and Empathy in Group Therapy“ Feb. 2013. This presentation was repeated and jointly presented with A. Brok PhD. at the annual conference of the International Association of Group Psychotherapy, Boston, MA, 2014.

Chris is also the co-founder of The EmpathyWorks Project (EWP) which is dedicated to delivering training in emotional intelligence and support for emotional well-being through digital technologies to broad segments of society. Within EWP, Chris has developed the “EmQ” (empathy quotient) a non-self-reporting instrument designed to measure an individual’s empathic ability. His approach to psychotherapy follows the precepts of “Relational Self Psychology,” and “Intersubjective Systems Theory,” which are contemporary schools in psychoanalytic thought.  A forward thinker, he is a regular participant in psychoanalytic conferences as a presenter and group facilitator. Prior to becoming a therapist, Chris had a successful twenty-year business career in the insurance and financial services industry, excelling in team building and communications.