Faculty

Whitney van Nouhuys
Email: wvannouhuys@sanville.edu

Dr. van Nouhuys is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Menlo Park and Berkeley since 1981; she works with individuals, couples, and families. She served as consultant to the staff of Peninsula School in Menlo Park for many years, and is currently on the supervising faculty of The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley and Women’s Therapy Center in El Cerrito. She is a clinical member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and has presented on self psychology in a variety of settings. She has also lectured on Transference in the Medical Relationship to primary care residents at Highland Hospital in Oakland. Earlier in her career, Dr. van Nouhuys worked for an agency that placed foreign high school students in American communities, for the Department of Public Social Services in South Central Los Angeles, as director of a co-operative elementary school, and as a legal worker in a community law office. She joined the faculty of The Sanville Institute in 2007.

Judith Schore
Email: jschore@sanville.edu

Dr. Schore is Dean of Students and a core faculty member of The Sanville Institute. She is also a clinical and research faculty member of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and is Social Work Consultant for the Lifespan Learning Institute. Dr. Schore has a private practice in Northridge, California and is the author of Women in Transition.

Of her many presentations at scholarly conferences, her most recent were at the Statewide Society for Clinical Social Work Conference in January 2009 and a presentation with Dr. Allan Schore at the AAPCSW National Conference in New York in February 2009.

Samoan Barish
sbarish@sanville.edu

Dr. Barish has served on the faculties of the Wright Institute and the University of Southern California.  She is currently on the faculty of The New Center for Psychoanalysis, and has served on the boards of the New Center and The Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.  She has practiced and consulted in numerous agency and hospital settings and social service agencies.  She maintains an independent practice in Pasadena and Santa Monica.  Her publications have appeared in the Clinical Social Work Journal, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, and the online journal OtherWise. She is a frequent presenter and workshop participant at statewide and national meetings. Dr. Barish served as a social service commissioner for the City of Santa Monica for eleven years. She is past president of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work.  She is currently on the board of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education.  Dr. Barish is a Founding Fellow of The Sanville Institute and served as Dean from 1992 to 1999.

Gregory Bellow
gbellow@sanville.edu

Dr. Bellow’s primary professional commitment was to work with children. Recently retired from clinical practice, he maintains an interest in writing and researching in the areas of clinical theory, social policy, and the uses of attachment theory with neglected children.

Mary Coombs
mcoombs@sanville.edu

Before moving from Philadelphia to Berkeley in 1995, Dr. Coombs practiced as a clinical social worker in community mental health doing direct practice, administration, as well as supervising MSW students from the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. She was on the faculty of Rutgers University, serving as the Graduate Field Work Director and Lecturer. She has been in independent practice since 1984. She completed a NIMH Post Doctoral Fellowship in mental health research at UC Berkeley from 1995-1997, where she focused on the role of emotion in psychotherapeutic change, and cross-cultural differences in psychological definitions of normal and abnormal development.  She has been a Lecturer at the U.C. Berkeley School of Social Welfare teaching Family Therapy and Foundations of Social Work Practice since 1998. She is a member of the Berkeley Psychotherapy Research Group in the department of clinical psychology at UC Berkeley, where she is doing process-outcome research on differences in the handling of emotion in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and Interpersonal Psychotherapy using the NIMH Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program data. She is on the Board of Directors of the Association of Family Therapists of Northern California, and the Bioenergetic Society of Northern California.  She is a member of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration and the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Current interests include a focus on socialization of emotion in the family, and on the process by which therapists integrate different treatment modalities in effective practice.

William M. Dombrowski
Email: wdombrowski@sanville.edu

Dr. Dombrowski has a background in family and youth services and has taught social work practice and research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Southern California.  He has been on the staff of Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center in Los Angeles since 1981 and appointed Director of Substance Abuse Services for the agency in 1986.  He joined the faculty of the Institute for Clinical Social Work in 1987.  His interests include small group dynamics; outcome and process in psychotherapy; and social service delivery systems.

Elinor Dunn Grayer
Email: egrayer@sanville.edu

Dr. Grayer has extensive clinical and consultative experience in a variety of settings.  She has served as supervisor and administrator in a mental health center and was a clinical associate of the University of Southern California School of Social Work. She has consulted with various social agencies in the greater Los Angeles area and has taught extensively in the U.S. and abroad in the areas of group psychotherapy, trauma, counter-transference, and the therapeutic use of improvisational acting. As a member of the International Society for the Study of Traumatic Stress, she debriefed mental health staff in Turkey following the 1999 earthquake and taught at Hacetteppe University in Ankara. After “9-11″ she consulted to and debriefed therapists who were running post-trauma groups in NY; after the L.A. earthquake in ’94 she debriefed staff, faculty, and students at Santa Monica College. She is a former Board member of the American Group Psychotherapy Association and is a Board member and Co-Chair of Education and Training for the Los Angeles Group Psychotherapy Society.

In addition to maintaining a private practice in Encino, California, she is a frequent presenter at local, state and national meetings, with special interests in counter transference, self-psychology, group psychotherapy, and trauma theory.

Alexandra Kivowitz
akivowitz@sanville.edu

In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Kivowitz is also field supervisor for bi-lingual social work interns placed through the Los Angeles Child Development Center at Camino Nuevo, a charter school in central Los Angeles. The school serves a primarily Latino neighborhood of recent immigrants. It is a way to try to stay abreast of the fast-moving changes in the life of her city and to “translate” what we learn and practice in the Institute to people who rarely find their way into private practice.

Judith K. Nelson
Email: jnelson@sanville.edu

Dr. Nelson is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has been in private practice in Napa and Berkeley since 1974. She has taught seminars and led consultation groups on Self-Psychology, DSM-III, III-R, and IV, Transference and Countertransference, Crisis Intervention, and on the theory of Crying and Attachment, which she developed in her dissertation and subsequently. Dr. Nelson has served as consultant and trainer for numerous social and mental health agencies. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kano, Nigeria, for two years working in the area of child welfare and family counseling and was a community worker in East Harlem, New York City, working with adolescents and their families.

Dr. Nelson is the author of Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment, published by Routledge in 2005, numerous articles on attachment-related topics, and a training manual on crisis intervention for paraprofessionals. She is currently working on a new book: What Made Freud Laugh? An Attachment Perspective on Laughter.

Cynthia A. O’Connell
coconnell@sanville.edu

Judith Schore
Email: jschore@sanville.edu

Dr. Schore is Dean of Students and a core faculty member of The Sanville Institute. She is also a clinical and research faculty member of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute and is Social Work Consultant for the Lifespan Learning Institute. Dr. Schore has a private practice in Northridge, California and is the author of Women in Transition.

Of her many presentations at scholarly conferences, her most recent were at the Statewide Society for Clinical Social Work Conference in January 2009 and a presentation with Dr. Allan Schore at the AAPCSW National Conference in New York in February 2009.

Alexis Selwood
Email: aselwood@sanville.edu

Dr. Selwood is a licensed clinical social worker who received her undergraduate degree in English Literature and her Masters and PhD in Clinical Social Work. Her full time clinical practice focuses on the long term impact of attachment disorders and early life trauma, as well as dissociation, anxiety, depression, and relationship problems. Improvisation, art, sensorimotor processing and neurobiology are incorporated into her Intersubjective/Relational practice.

She is a member of International and California Societies for the Study of Dissociation, National Association of Social Workers, Society for Clinical Social Workers and California Group Psychotherapy.

Her interests include international traveling, hiking, gardening, and gourmet cooking.

Dr. Selwood has taught at UCLA and USC and has provided CEU Courses in supervision in a variety of settings, including:
West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center
Airport Marina Counseling Center
Hathaway Children & Family Service (Supervision & Ethics)
California Society for Clinical Social Work Conference in Palm Springs
Metropolitan State Hospital
The Maple Center
Riverside County Department of Mental Health (Supervision & Culture)

Sylvia Sussman
Email: ssussman@sanville.edu

Dr. Sussman is a sociologist who embraces an interdisciplinary approach. Her background includes post doctoral research at the Tavistock Institute in London, studying with the “Interactionist” school of sociologists, and working as a post doc with R.D. Laing’s research team on Families and Schizophrenia.  Currently director of research at Sanville, she teaches the research seminars, the epistemological colloquium and is available for dissertation advisement.

Dr. Sussman has extensive research and teaching experience specializing in qualitative research methods and epistemology. Her dissertation research [A Sociological Study of English Aestheticism, 1885-1910: With special reference to aesthetic withdrawal as a social phenomenon, its sources, imagery and social-psychological components] a study of a group of poets through analysis of their work, their lives and their socio-cultural context, reveals what remains her continuing concern with the relation between culture/social context and the individual psyche, as well as her interests in social deviance and in literature.  She is also a practicing and exhibiting painter.

Currently Dr. Sussman is a private consultant on qualitative and theoretical dissertation research. She has served on various other faculties, including the Center for Psychological Studies, Wright Institute, Hayward State University, San Francisco Art Institute (Humanities), and held research positions with Dr. Margaret Singer, National Institute of Mental Health; Agnews State Hospital; Kaiser Medical Center, (as project Co-director).  Her independent research includes a field study of interaction in a school for autistic children (see publications).  She has given numerous presentations and published in Views Quarterly (London) and the American J. of Orthopsychiatry.

Selected Presentations

“The Culture of Psychotherapy & Psychotherapy in the Larger Culture,” The Sanville Institute, Fall Convocation 2006

“Qualitative Research and the Clinician: An introduction to Grounded Theory applied to clinically relevant problems”  Paper delivered at The  7th Conference of the  National Membership Committee on Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work as part of a panel on qualitative research presented by CICSW. New York, 2000.

“On Establishing Connections Between Patient and Analyst:  A dialogue between clinician and researcher”  with Samoan Barish, DSW, PhD.  Paper presented at the 4th National Clinical Conference, Committee on Psychoanalysis of the National Federation of Societies for Clinical Social Work, Los Angeles, October, l992.

“An Epistemology and a Method for Research in Clinical Social Work” with Rosemary Lukton, DSW. Paper accepted for presentation, Annual Conference of the National Association of Social Workers. Philadelphia, November 1988.

“Clinicians as Social Researchers” with Elise Blumenfeld, PhD and Karlin Hanks, PhD.  Paper  presented at the NASW National Conference on Clinical Social Work, San Francisco, September, 1986.

“Why Are There No Middle Aged Women in Fairy Tales?: Two studies in adult development” with Elise Blumenfeld, PhD and Karlin Hanks, PhD.  Paper presented at the meetings of the California Society of Clinical Social Workers. Los Angeles, October, 1985.

Four Public lectures given at the San Francisco Art Institute, 1972 & 73:
“Surrealism as a Mode of Thought and a Question to the Existing Structures of Thought.” “The Family and Women’s Identity.” “The poetry of Keith Barnes and Jana Harris: Two Poets of Family Life, a masculine and feminine point of view.”

Selected Publications and Reports

A RESEARCH GUIDE.  unpublished manuscript, l982.  A handbook that reviews basic research methods, concepts and philosophies. Prepared for the CA Institute for Clinical Social Work.

“Perceptions of Higher Education: Why Be in Graduate School?” and “Stress in Graduate School”  Part I on Growth and Development Among Doctoral Students in an Innovative Doctoral Program. Report to Dean Judith Blanton, PhD, Graduate Program in Psychosocial Development and Education, The Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA, 1981.

“Psychological Factors in Respiratory Allergy.”  Jacob, Freeman, Alward, & Sussman.  Report to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1970.

“The Social Awareness of Autistic Children” with June Sklar, MA. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 34(5), October, 1969.

Whitney van Nouhuys
Email: wvannouhuys@sanville.edu

Dr. van Nouhuys is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in private practice in Menlo Park and Berkeley since 1981; she works with individuals, couples, and families. She served as consultant to the staff of Peninsula School in Menlo Park for many years, and is currently on the supervising faculty of The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley and Women’s Therapy Center in El Cerrito. She is a clinical member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and has presented on self psychology in a variety of settings. She has also lectured on Transference in the Medical Relationship to primary care residents at Highland Hospital in Oakland. Earlier in her career, Dr. van Nouhuys worked for an agency that placed foreign high school students in American communities, for the Department of Public Social Services in South Central Los Angeles, as director of a co-operative elementary school, and as a legal worker in a community law office. She joined the faculty of The Sanville Institute in 2007.

Steven Zemmelman
Email: szemmelman@sanville.edu