Dr. Navvab Tadjvar

Licensed Psychologist

I practice psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy, which focuses on the relationship between the unconscious mind and conscious behavior. Rather than utilizing standardized worksheets or behavioral checklists, my "tools" are the fundamental elements of the clinical encounter: free association, the analysis of transference, dream work, and a deep attention to the unique logic of your speech. We work with the material that emerges in the "here and now," including dreams, slips, and moments of resistance, to loosen the structural bonds of your distress. The goal of this method is not merely to provide temporary coping mechanisms, but to facilitate a genuine subjective transformation by unraveling the internal knots that have historically oriented your life.

I approach therapy psychoanalytically and psychodynamically, which means I encourage you to speak openly and freely about whatever comes to mind. What emerges, both in what is said and what is harder to say, becomes the material we work with. Often, the very issues that bring you into therapy begin to show up within the therapy itself, and through unraveling the knots that currently orient you, transformation becomes possible.

In my clinical practice, a recurring theme is the friction between a person's conscious desire for change and the unconscious processes that keep them tethered to repetition. Many individuals possess a clear intellectual understanding of what isn't working, whether in their relationships, career, dating life, or self-image, yet find themselves repeating the same patterns, pulled by a compulsion toward the very outcomes they wish to avoid. My approach, grounded in psychoanalysis, focuses on encountering these tensions in real time to shift the underlying self-relation. Rather than merely managing symptoms, we work to decipher the internal logic of these repetitive cycles, opening a possibility for a genuine subjective traverse that was previously obscured.