Matt Valdes, MA

About Matt

After completing my bachelor’s in linguistics at University of Connecticut, I shifted my investigation into the strange phenomena of language by turning my attention to how speech manifests in the clinic of psychoanalysis. Now, in the final year of a master’s in clinical counseling and psychotherapy at the Institute for Clinical Social Work, I attend to the human stakes of our being-in-language in an effort to chart a path through “the talking cure”. 

I think of the work of psychoanalysis much like the process of undoing a tangled knot. In order to know how to proceed one must involve one’s hands in the work of pulling on threads and becoming intimate with their interrelations. Together, we will examine the knot that may have you feeling stuck, following strands of thought one by one, in order to loosen the grip of symptoms that have come to tie your world together. The goal for my patients is a kind of attunement to the inner forces that make you unique, allowing you to navigate the paradoxes of human existence without becoming estranged from what makes life worth living.

By offering a space for free speech, I aim in my listening to be a tour guide of the unconscious, helping you to find the mystery within yourself that holds the seed for change. In sessions, you can expect me to ask questions, wonder out loud about correspondences I hear in your speech, or highlight moments where I sense something more lies beneath the surface.

Informed by the teachings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, I listen for how unconscious communications emerge in dreams, slips of the tongue, repetitions, and symptoms. By holding open these holes in self-knowledge, I encourage you to find expression for what was previously unsayable and transmute these rifts into portals onto new futures and possibilities.

Rather than prescribing a predetermined method for adaptation or encouraging you to adopt a certain privileged way of being in the world, I will bring to our sessions a respect and curiosity about the unique logic of your reality, working to facilitate greater freedom by supporting you in crafting your own cure out of the raw materials you bring to sessions.

I work well with those who are curious about the unknown factors that drive them, but who may not feel there has been a safe space to explore such topics. Those who may feel alienated, misunderstood, or isolated can find a space free of judgment in my practice. I believe that work with me can best serve those who are seeking a creative venue for the construction of their own way of making sense of their experience.

I encourage my patients to bring in dreams, memories they have never spoken about, or feelings they have never put into words. I stress the importance of striving to speak freely in sessions about whatever comes to mind without censorship, including dynamics between the two of us that may feel too confrontational to address in typical social contexts.

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