Certain lives require a more exacting kind of conversation.

VIDALA is a deliberately small psychology practice for people whose lives may carry combinations of creativity, responsibility, visibility, ambition, intensity, sensitivity and sustained demand. These qualities can enlarge a life. They can also complicate it.

The work begins with the person, not the category.

A person is more than a category.

Diagnosis can be useful. It can clarify patterns, guide treatment and give language to experience. But it is not a complete account of a person.

A life is shaped at once by temperament and history, mind and body, relationships and environment, ambition and circumstance. The same qualities that contribute to originality, achievement, intimacy or extraordinary concentration can, under different conditions, become sources of friction.

Sometimes the task is treatment. Sometimes it is adaptation, refinement or optimization. Often the distinction is less important than understanding what should change, what should be protected, and what would allow a person to live with greater freedom.

Strength and difficulty can coexist.

Human functioning cannot always be understood adequately through symptoms alone. A person can be capable of extraordinary focus and still struggle to stop; highly productive and periodically depleted; deeply sensitive and remarkably resilient; psychologically sophisticated and still caught inside patterns that are difficult to see from within.

The aim is not to flatten these contradictions. It is to understand how they belong together.

A life is understood in context.

My background spans clinical psychology, behavioral science and neuroscience. The work therefore considers the person in context rather than assuming that any one perspective contains the whole explanation.

Emotion and cognition matter. So do development, attachment and relationships; learning and behavior; trauma and adaptation; stress physiology and neurobehavioral systems; culture and environment; meaning, values, creativity and the conditions under which people flourish.

The approach is integrative without treating every theory as equally established. Some ideas are supported by substantial empirical evidence. Others are useful clinical models. Still others matter because they ask unusually good questions.

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When experience exceeds ordinary language.

Experiences that profoundly alter perception, identity, emotion or one's sense of reality can be among the most meaningful—and sometimes among the most destabilizing—events in a person's life.

The work may involve preparation where professionally appropriate, integration after psychedelic or other non-ordinary experiences, difficult or destabilizing states, changes in identity or worldview, spiritual or mystical experience, and the problem of bringing something extraordinary back into ordinary life.

The stance is one of openness without credulity, and rigor without reflexive pathologizing.

An experience need not be dismissed because it is difficult to explain. Nor does its intensity establish a particular metaphysical interpretation.

More on psychedelic integration →

Psychology need not begin with pathology.

Some work begins with anxiety, mood, trauma, relationships, sexuality, compulsive patterns or a major transition. Other work begins with a life that is already functioning well but has become difficult to sustain, govern or deepen.

Creativity, leadership, performance, identity, meaning and psychological sustainability can be serious subjects of psychological work in their own right.

The objective is not perpetual self-improvement. It is greater freedom in how one's capacities are used.

Not everything worth changing is a disorder.

Psychology has developed sophisticated ways of studying suffering. It also contains serious traditions concerned with well-being, motivation, mastery, expertise, creativity, flow and human flourishing.

Absence of dysfunction is not the same thing as flourishing. Exceptional functioning is not necessarily effortless functioning. For some people, the work concerns less a return to baseline than learning how to understand, sustain and govern capacities that already extend considerably beyond it.

Depth requires room.

VIDALA is intentionally limited to a small number of people. That scale allows the work to remain individualized, thoughtful, flexible, continuous and discreet without turning those qualities into a formula.

There is no standard psychological life. There should not be a standard psychological relationship.

A practice designed to move.

VIDALA is not organized around a single physical location. My life and work move between different parts of the world, and the practice is structured with that mobility in mind.

In-person meetings may sometimes be arranged in connection with my travel or, in particular circumstances, by private arrangement. Geography, format and frequency are considered individually, as is the nature of the work professionally appropriate and permissible in each location.

I work personally in English and French.

Between science and lived experience.

I am a clinical psychologist licensed in New York and Québec. Over roughly twenty-five years, my work has developed at the intersection of clinical psychology and the behavioral sciences, with a longstanding interest in the relationships among mind, brain, body, behavior and environment.

That scientific background matters to how I think. So do the traditions of psychology concerned with development, relationships, unconscious processes, meaning and subjective experience.

I am interested in what can be measured. I am equally interested in what a measurement leaves out.

About Michael →   Approach →

Language need not be a barrier to beginning.

Michael works directly in English and French. Hebrew may also be used where appropriate, with language assistance available when greater precision is useful. For other languages, translation or interpretation assistance may be considered by prior arrangement.

AI-assisted translation and interpretation have become increasingly sophisticated and accessible. Where appropriate, their use is considered with attention to accuracy, privacy, confidentiality and the nature of the work.

The language in which this website can be read does not necessarily indicate the language in which professional services are provided.

A private conversation begins simply.

You do not need to decide in advance whether what brings you is clinical, developmental, existential, relational or something harder to name. A few lines are enough.

Tell me what is happening, what you are looking for, and where you are located.