Embodied Fantasy Therapy

1. Embodied Fantasy Therapy offers relational psychodynamic/mindfulness group therapy in an ample office at 303 Fifth Ave. Drama is allowed in terms of patients acting improvised scenes and role plays if they so choose. The playing of a song or reading of a poem/other literature, or displaying visual art is also encouraged within certain bounds. The groups also may use short meditations and yogic breathing exercises. Patients become more attuned to their own bodies while verbalizing their experience and its dynamic meaning. Mirroring and  empathy is sought, alongside imagination.
2. Embodiment is a synergy of feeling and thought, body and mind, when the sense of an illusionary whole experience works. Embodiment means playing one's signature role, even with certain symptoms that will not leave (see Lacan's sinthome), viscerally, with a freer range of imagination. In our view, the clinical goal of embodiment must also entail, for the health of individuals and the world, an ironic awareness of the illusion and fantasy at the core of human mental processes, continually, in dynamic form, as unconscious illusion and fantasy often shape daily decisions and thoughts. After all, it is prejudiced and rigid absolutism that plagues the world, not a more open stance that would acknowledge ambiguity.
3. Embodied Fantasy Therapy explores that line between playful acceptance of illusion with reinvention/cultural exploration and attachment. 
4. In Playing and Reality, D.W. Winnicott describes the potential space as existing between imagination and reality, combining both elements, the real and subjective/ fantasy in a sign of healthy development for the child. 
5. Creative, cultural experience in an internal, personal form offers consolation for the pain of cognitive separation from the mother as the toddler develops a sense of separate identity.
6. The potential space is the axis of human health in its imaginative, individuating capacities; indeed, without an experience that can be both meaningfully internal and external, as creative activities can be, there is no integration of fantasy and reality for the person or even of coming to terms with their disparateness, as there is emptiness where fantasy would be and the need for a self based in the body and potential space.
7. Given the paradox of human experience in terms of the need to commit to a role with certain meanings in one's social experience on one hand and the extent to which one suffers due to the over-investment of attachment on the other, a simultaneous need for earnest authenticity and awareness of humans' slant towards illusory interpretation of events, as well as our own, is healthy. 
8. The main  purpose of psychotherapy for individual and group work needs to be the disruption of prevailing, rigidifying systems of thought and feeling that are self-enclosed, similar to what Freud termed, "overdetermined."
9. Simultaneously, an opening arising out of that disruption would allow exploration of one's potential space and realizations fully embodied, thought and feeling in harmonious confluence, therefore translating into clear action. Let's find our fleeting sense of dynamic truths to be communicated, however imperfectly and in fragmented form, while holding them with a playful sense of irony and possible transformation. 

Facilitated by Dr. Dylan Marks and other clinically trained staff.   

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• Dr. Dylan Marks provides individual psychotherapy at 303 Fifth Avenue, Monday through Friday.

• A holding environment is facilitated. Joining, mirroring and empathy build the relationship and the patient's self-understanding. By better understanding their own feelings and thoughts, emotionally and cognitively, in a process that is internal and external like the potential space, in the therapy session, the patient can also reimagine themselves based on reclaiming what had been hidden or buried. 

• Playfulness with imaginative spontaneity is helpful when it can be freed up; thus, space is created for the patient's searching of their own vital truths and repairing through them. 

• Dr. Marks works with attunement in queer and straight spaces, in groups and individually. He works with clinical depression, various forms of anxiety, personality disorders, OCD, bipolarity,  ADHD, relationship and sexual issues, the search for meaning, particularly in adolescence and young adulthood, improving communication/perspective-taking in the social environment, self-regulation, mindfulness in navigating impulses and recognizing unwanted feelings/self-states, and on becoming free from distorted, internalized object relationships. 

• Dr. Marks' modalities of theory and practice are primarily interpersonal, object relational psychoanalytic with some CBT, exposure therapy and trauma therapy (EMDR) offered in response to your needs.

• Dr.Marks accepts most major insurance, including Anthem (BCBS), Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare and Medicare. In-person and virtual therapy are offered.