Dr. Robert J Winer, MD

He never actually did therapy with me. We talked, but it was like talk at a dinner party, when you're more or less stuck with one person, off in a corner. The conversation was more than superficial but not that deep. Sometimes if I mentioned the name of someone in my life whom he didn't recognize, he would look on his cheat sheet, a piece of paper on which he'd noted all a patient's family members, friends, partners, co-workers, etc. (It was a little disheartening when I'd see him do this, but oh well.) He talked quite a bit about his experiences, and he was a decent enough conversationalist; some of his stories were interesting, but they didn't bear much on my situation, or whatever I'd been talking about, except superficially. Again, it was dinner party conversation: area restaurants he liked, an amusing story from his past. He never brought up the possibility of formulating therapeutic goals, or ways to measure improvement, or what exactly was the therapeutic approach he was taking.… Because it--whatever it was we were doing--didn't seem to me to be therapy, I asked him once "What are we doing here?" but he didn't say anything to clarify--only "Well if you have any questions, you are free to ask them." Which cleared up exactly nothing. I quit after a few months.

I felt like I took a trip in a time machine. Winer claims to be a practitioner of relational psychoanalysis, which took off in the 1980s, but the actual session felt very much like the classical psychoanalysis of the 1960s. Winer is clearly aware of the theoretical developments since then, but they seem to have little to do with his practice. His practice is basically Freud, with a little bit of the British Object Relations school sprinkled in. The only non-classical aspect is that you do not use a couch, and he does interact with you. Expect to do a lot of dream interpretation, where he'll tell you exactly what that dream means. Oedipus is central (in its pure, Freudian form), as is the possibility of recovering memories. Also expect a mix of 1950s conservatism and 1960s counterculture dangled in front of you, dressed up as theory.

This analyst holds some disturbing beliefs about psychology that have been thoroughly debunked in scientific literature, such as the ability to recover repressed memories.

Dr. Winer holds an M.D. from an Ivy League school but is incredibly out of date regarding current psychiatric medications and treatments that go back as far as ten years. He is an analyst, not a physician— despite his impressive pedigree— but his practice of psychoanalysis seemed to invite ridiculous conclusions even from a psychoanalytic perspective. I would not recommend this physician, but it is unlikely that he will be practicing in a few years anyway due to his age.