Confidential · Private pay · Remote
Lacanian psychoanalysis with David M. Freshwater, LMHC.
If your last therapy was mostly checking in about your week and learning some coping skills, this is a different, deeper, more meaningful kind of work.
Fifteen minutes, free.
What brings people here
There before anything has happened, and there when your life is objectively fine. You know the techniques by now. Anxiety is a signal. The work is finding out what it’s signalling.
Sadness would make sense; you’d know what to do with it. This is the absence of feeling, in a life you can see is a good one, which adds guilt to the numbness.
Something from before that isn’t over. It surfaces in the body, in what you avoid, in reactions that belong to another time and arrive anyway.
With one person over years, or with someone new each time, the shape holds. Wanting more than they’ll give, or going cold as soon as they get close. Something in you keeps steering it there.
You know what you want, and you sabotage it just enough to make it hard. Books, coaching, coping skills: none of it reaches whatever makes the decision.
Plenty of people arrive with no clinical problem at all. They want to work out what they actually want, as distinct from what they’ve absorbed from everyone else.
Different starting points, and the work tends toward the same thing. Symptoms tend to ease as the reasons behind them come into view. The past loses some of its grip, and you become more free in your choices.
What a session is like
Psychoanalysis is a practice of speech. One person speaks; the other listens to what gets said, and to what escapes saying, so that you can come to know something of the truth of your desire.
You talk without editing, including the parts that seem off-topic, petty, or embarrassing, and I help you to hear the parts of yourself that have gone quiet within you.
The premise
Symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, slips of the tongue, the patterns of a whole life: they’re all saying something if you’re willing to listen.
Sessions typically run between twenty and fifty minutes. I’ll often stop on a question rather than tie things off, because a lot of the work happens in the days afterward while you’re still turning it over.
Who I am
I’m David M. Freshwater, a licensed mental health counselor in Massachusetts, license #10001743. I hold a master’s in mental health counseling from Brooklyn College and a bachelor’s in psychology from Columbia University. I’ve been doing clinical work since 2017 in community mental health clinics and private practice.
I work in the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition because it worked on me. Symptoms I had carried for years, that no other kind of therapy had touched, went away as I spoke freely and worked through what was underneath them. I live in Northampton, MA with my wife and kids. When I’m not working, I enjoy meditating, reading, and playing board games.
FAQ
Typically $200 a session. The fee is negotiable for those coming more than once a week.
At minimum, once a week, at a regularly scheduled time. Meeting more frequently deepens the process, and the fee is negotiable if you do.
Typically twenty to fifty minutes. The Greeks had two words for time: chronos, the time a clock measures, and kairos, the right moment for something. Sessions end on the second kind. When something lands, that is where we stop, so it stays with you.
Remotely. By video or phone.
I’m an out of network provider. I can provide you with monthly superbills that you can submit yourself.
There’s no set number of sessions and no discharge date. It ends when you decide.
Adults, eighteen and over.
I post about this work on TikTok, at @davidmfreshwater. If you have a question this doesn’t answer, the consult is a good place to ask it, or you can call or text me at (786) 527-1616.
The consult
I’ll ask what’s going on and what you’ve already tried. You can ask me anything, including the awkward questions.
If it sounds like a fit, we’ll book a first meeting. If it doesn’t, I’ll say so and try to point you somewhere better. I’d rather do that than take on someone I can’t help.
Got it. Thank you for writing.
I read these myself and I’ll typically write back within one business day with a couple of times. If you want to say more before we talk, just reply to that email.
David
Rather not use a form? Call or text (786) 527-1616, or write to freshwater.david.m@gmail.com.