Personal Statement

I am a highly trained and experienced psychotherapist. For over 25 years, I have worked with individuals and couples who are suffering from a wide range of problems including depression, anxiety, loneliness, low self-esteem, trauma, communication breakdowns, parenting concerns, and relationship and work stress.

Choosing a therapist and beginning psychotherapy can be a challenging process. It is important to feel safe with the person you work with in order to talk about your emotions and what is on your mind openly and fully. As your therapist, I will work with you in a warm, attentive and empathic way. I offer an intelligent, thoughtful, and non-judgmental approach to understanding and clarifying emotionally confusing and overwhelming experiences. I work in a collaborative way, so that both individuals and couples are invited to work with me in a joint exploration of each person’s own unique suffering and strengths in order to enable newer and more fulfilling ways to experience life.

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Professional Biography

Dr. Nancy Kaplan received her B.S. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1978. She subsequently worked for 2 years with Dr. Sybille Escalona at the Kennedy Center of Albert Einstein Medical School on a longitudinal study of prematurely born infants growing up in the South Bronx. In 1980, Kaplan entered a Ph.D. program in Developmental Psychology at UC Berkeley where she worked with Professor Mary Main on her study of infant-parent attachment and its impact on later development in the middle childhood and adulthood. In addition, Kaplan trained for 2 years at the Infant-Parent Program at San Francisco General Hospital and was awarded a 2 year fellowship at the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs. After receiving her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1987, Kaplan completed her post-doctoral training at Mount Zion's Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic.

Kaplan co-authored the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) with Carol George and Mary Main in 1985, as well as attachment classification systems for middle childhood, using both family drawings (Kaplan and Main, 1987) and responses to a Separation Anxiety Test (Kaplan, 1987). She co-authored with Mary Main and Jude Cassidy the seminal 1985 article "Move to the Level of Representation" which presents the relationship between infant-parent attachment and later internal representations of those early experiences. She is also a co-author with Mary Main and Erik Hesse (2005) on the more recent paper presenting the results of the 19-year follow up study of the same attachment cohort.

For the past 20 years, Kaplan has combined a career of research and teaching in the field of attachment with a career of clinical work with adults and children. She is a certified AAI trainer and conducts Adult Attachment Training Institutes to researchers around the world. She has also been a research consultant on studies of attachment at numerous national and international universities.

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