Navvab Tadjvar PsyD

Psychoanalytic therapy is an approach that helps you understand and transform patterns that shape your emotions, relationships, and sense of self. Through open dialogue and close attention to thoughts, feelings, and the therapeutic relationship, it brings unconscious dynamics into awareness. The goal is lasting change, greater agency, emotional depth, and more satisfying ways of relating to yourself and others.

My approach is pluralistic, drawing from classical Freudian, object relations, and Lacanian traditions.

I see the therapeutic relationship as a setting where patterns of feeling, relating, and meaning naturally emerge. As we talk, I pay close attention to how past experiences repeat themselves in our work together. My aim is to help loosen stuck patterns of relating and support you in adding to your repertoire of ways of being in relationship.

Depression can feel like a turning inward of energy, a retreat from life when engagement has felt too painful or overwhelming. Beneath the heaviness, there is often a story of loss, frustration, or unmet longing that has not yet found expression. In our work together, I help bring these experiences into awareness and into relationships, so that what has been frozen or dampened can begin to move again, allowing vitality and meaning to reemerge.

Anxiety often feels like a buildup of tension in both mind and body, a signal that something in the present stirs echoes of earlier feelings of helplessness. Together, we can make sense of what underlies that tension and begin to untangle the patterns that keep it in place, allowing for greater ease, clarity, and confidence in daily life.

I utilize a psychoanalytic approach to treat Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I understand obsessions and compulsions as meaningful responses to anxiety and internal conflict. By listening closely to how symptoms function in your life, treatment helps loosen their grip through a transformed relationship to ambivalence, uncertainty, responsibility, and desire.