Dr. Kendra Terry is a postdoctoral fellow and clinical psychologist who draws on relational and humanistic approaches to psychodynamic psychotherapy. She believes that therapy provides a unique space in which people are permitted—encouraged—to be working on something, whether it be treating symptoms, exploring existential questions, or finding and creating meaning. The work strives to move an individual through the creative process of expanding and deepening their awareness of themselves and the ways they relate to others. In this way, therapy can be seen, above all, as a practice in being present with what lies before us.

Dr. Terry’s current research, primarily theoretical, focuses on nodes of connection between art and literature, broadly defined, and psychoanalysis. She is interested in the inscription of both verbal and nonverbal language in therapeutic discourse, and the joint pursuit of psychotherapy and art as residing in a Socratic attempt to know thyself and an exploration of subjective human experience as underlying both disciplines. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Nonlinear Polyphony, Or: Something of Significance, that explores the use of the poetic function in psychotherapy and a trend she calls the Mash-Up that sits at the intersection of psychoanalysis, contemporary literature, and social media technology.

She completed her doctoral studies in clinical psychology at the Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University. Her training has also included placements at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, with a focus on the foundations of classical psychoanalysis, the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, with a focus on contemporary relational psychoanalysis, the William Alanson White Institute, with a focus on interpersonal psychoanalysis, and Silver Hill Hospital, where she worked in a residential setting.