Rashida Black, AM’06, AM’15, was a classical harpist who studied ethnomusicology before becoming a holistic psychotherapist based in California. Suzi Naiburg, PhD’89, whose family includes four generations of UChicago students and alumni, is a Massachusetts-based psychoanalyst who also teaches writing to therapists. Leigh Ann Smith-Gary, PhD’12, AM’14, who practices in Connecticut, transitioned from Germanic studies to become a therapist working in the tradition of one-time UChicago professor Carl Rogers. The three alumnae spoke with Tableau about their journey from scholarship to private practice therapy, including how their intellectual work continues alongside and within their work with clients.
What is your approach to therapy?
Black: I consider myself an empath, so I tap into what a feeling means, how it resonates, and how it is triggered. I’ve done a combination of cognitive therapies and hypnosis. In hypnotherapy, I get clients to this very calm space, where their body is relaxed, and they can turn off all the chatter. Let’s say a client is having a pain somewhere or discomfort, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. Together we make a journey to understand what this pain point is trying to communicate. I’m guiding them through this experience so they can meet various parts of themselves and integrate.
Naiburg: I would identify myself as a relational psychoanalyst and trauma therapist who can draw on contemporary analytic approaches as well as the resources of hypnosis, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] therapy, and attachment work. EMDR was first used to treat PTSD and now offers tools for addressing a wide range of conditions. Like hypnosis, it involves the same kind of intense focus and softening of attention to the periphery in the processing phases so that the mind becomes relaxed, allowing more memories and associations to emerge and break through repetitive patterns, recontextualizing trauma experience.
Smith-Gary: My approach is the client-centered approach, which was started by Carl Rogers. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago [1945–57], where he founded a counseling center that was the first to do evidence-based research into what’s effective in therapy. He found that three conditions are both necessary and sufficient to facilitate therapeutic change: empathic understanding, unconditional positive regard for the client, and congruence on the part of the therapist—a rigorous self-awareness, so that you’re aware of and accepting of your own internal states. As a client-centered therapist, you do not try to play detective. You stay right next to, or even slightly behind, the person as they are unfolding themselves with you. You’re not creating theories about them or telling them what their reality is.
Carl Rogers was a Midwestern boy. He talked about the potatoes that are left in the root cellar over winter. You know those distorted, pale, ghostly shoots that will come out as the potato is striving toward the light? He said the human organism often works in those ways. We are striving to grow in whatever ways are possible, and sometimes that growth will look anemic, or confused, or a bit underdeveloped. But if you are in the business of valuing the person, you are also in the business of believing that, however that growth looks, the person is doing the best that they can in their circumstances. The growth doesn’t have to be beautiful to be a product of our most valuable human striving.
What do you like most about your job?
Naiburg: People can change and have richer lives. Obviously, people come to therapy because something doesn’t satisfy them. They’re not feeling as fulfilled or as lively as they’d like to be. So, you help them with what they come for, but hopefully you also help them expand their capacity for meaning-making and living the life they’d like to have.
Black: I don’t want to call it channeling—I’m super woo-woo, so I say words like that—but it’s that shared humanity, like we’re reflecting one another. Therapy is how I can be supportive of your journey, but it’s not the healed helping the unhealed. I’m a healer, but so are you. I get to be uncomfortable and grow every day.
Smith-Gary: I’m very interested in the internal landscapes of people. I also love the intimacy that comes in hour-long segments. I can immerse myself fully, and then I can be with myself again. It’s a way of life that really suits me.
How has your humanities background informed your career?
Smith-Gary: I’ll always remember one of my therapeutic mentors saying, “You know, the best way to become a therapist—and a good one—is to read literature, not psychology.” I had worked on nineteenth-century realist literature for my dissertation on the trope of the sublime in the German tradition. It reflected my interest in observing human beings at their limits, right at these moments of intensity, of overwhelm, of terror, of deep pain, and of understanding how that can be metabolized. In writing my dissertation I was nearing 30 and asked, “What would I do if I could do anything in the world?” I gave myself permission to consider therapy. It felt very brave and audacious at the time. I went across the street to what is now called the Crown Family School, and I sat in on some psychodynamic classes and really enjoyed them. I applied to the school, defended my dissertation, and transitioned the next fall.
I was placed at the [Sonia Shankman] Orthogenic School. It was originally a psychoanalytic institution that worked with teens and kids. My mentor there, Matt Spitzmueller [AM’05, AM’08, PhD’14], introduced me to a group of therapists who had been trained by Carl Rogers and his students. Carolyn Schneider [AB’86, AM’87] and Susan Pildes, master therapists, took me under their wing. I then moved to Ithaca, New York, and by chance there was another member of this small group there. With her help, I started working at the counseling center at Cornell University. That experience with undergraduate and graduate students set me up to practice privately, which is what I do now.
Naiburg: Sometimes a patient might have trouble thinking about the meaning of something, and I might say to them, “Imagine you’re a character in a short story and this happens. What do you think the author might be offering the readers?” Sometimes that frees them up to make connections they might not have otherwise made. The other thing is that literature teaches sensitivity to form, pattern, image, and language and presents a variety of characters and motivations. All these things help me listen to a patient. There’s a lot of interest in narrative and associative process in talk therapy. The more you look and listen, the more you see and hear. I think it’s a sensibility that I bring from the study of literature. I started studying at MIP [the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis] because I wanted to bring a wider range of psychodynamic frameworks to my studies of literature. My interest in psychological studies of Henry James and the James family tilted me toward more psychological frames of mind and eventually led to my becoming a psychoanalyst.
After writing my dissertation, I went through a couple of career changes, including being an Allston Burr Senior Tutor at Harvard, which is an academic dean in residence. In that role, I helped students navigate administrative and personal hurtles while also teaching expository writing. I left Harvard to go to social work school in my fifties. I brought my two most recent careers together to specialize in teaching psychotherapists how to write more creatively about their clinical work, and that led me to write Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose: A Writer’s Guide for Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists [Routledge, 2015]. In addition to doing psychotherapy, I love working with writers because they grow as people through writing. Writing prompts further reflections. They deepen or make connections that aren’t yet clear—making the implicit explicit. They’re growing in the process of communicating, of expressing who they are as clinicians.
Black: I was a classical harpist, and my master’s thesis was on the Black presence in classical music. I focused on ethnomusicology. As an ethnographer, you learn interview techniques and different ways to speak with people who are not like you. That really helped me to understand not only various cultures but also the historical context that can shape our experiences. After graduating I started a nonprofit called the Myrtle Hart Society, after the first Black harpist I could find historical representation of. She performed at the 1893 World’s Fair. I wanted to form and find community. I used to do these monthly newsletters. I got kind of overwhelmed, and then some other folks started doing something similar, so I thought I could continue moving forward. I then started working at the Music Department at UChicago as director of communications, which drew on the work that I’ve done in Myrtle Hart—getting the word out about something I love. I was there for seven years working full time while going to school for my clinical social work degree. All these experiences help me to approach therapy with an appreciation for the multifaceted human experience.
What was your UChicago experience like?
Naiburg: My first childhood home was at 5487 Hyde Park Boulevard, so I felt I was coming home. I loved Karl Weintraub’s [AB’49, AM’52, PhD’57] course on the history of culture and was a PhD candidate on that committee. Basically, we set our own curriculum. I specialized in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, concentrating on Mark Twain and Henry James. After I mapped out enough material for two dissertations, my Twain mentor, Hamlin Hill [PhD’59], said I had to pick one and that I was limited to 200 pages. I moved from broader questions about how differently they approached writing about American culture to much more psychological interests and ended up writing a dissertation on Henry James called “‘The Appalling Other’ in Henry James” that put a nightmare of his front and center. A number of those dissertation chapters were published in revised form. The chapter on his nightmare won an award in 1993 [from American Literary Scholarship] for the best long essay on Henry James that year.
Black: One thing I loved, loved, loved about UChicago were some of the nooks and crannies I would find myself in. There was this little garden right outside of the music department, and the vibration of the bees when I would sit there eating my lunch was just wonderful. There are also little areas in libraries or the performance hall that felt comforting and warm—these little sacred spaces. I’m getting a visual of dark wood that feels so UChicago to me.
Smith-Gary: What I really enjoyed, quite funnily, was the sense of seriousness the architecture lent to the spaces where we students would meet. I spent a lot of time as a Germanic studies student in Wieboldt 206. There were those Gothic windows and the Virginia creeper half smothering them, and then the café right down the hall. I think I loved the sense that people were completely committed to what they were doing. I also had some wonderful mentors. Eric Santner [the Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Germanic Studies] and David Wellbery [the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor of Germanic Studies] were leading lights in the German world. They were extremely gracious in not standing in the way of my career transition. It can be quite daunting to detach from a culture that assumes that to succeed is to succeed in academia and that to do something else is a real departure; I would say to anyone considering a similar leap that you can take your best traits with you anywhere.