Dr. Starr received her bachelor’s in computer science from Barnard College and then subsequently received her Master’s, also in computer science, from Columbia University’s School of Engineering. Dr. Starr worked in the computer software industry for 12 years prior to making a career switch to Clinical Psychology. After having three children, Dr. Starr went on to pursue her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from C.W. Post, from which she graduated in 2007.
Dr. Starr thoroughly enjoyed going to school, especially working on her dissertation at Post, which she began working on at the end of her first year. Dr. Starr was particularly interested in formulations of how people change and felt that the Kabbalistic metaphors of transformation had something to offer psychoanalysis and vice versa. Her dissertation was an examination of metaphors of transformation in Jewish mysticism (the Kabbalah) and psychoanalysis. Eventually, Dr. Starr developed Benjamin’s, and later Aron’s, notion of “thirdness” into what she called the “transcendent Third.” This is the experience in transformation that one is connected with a larger whole, which Freud referred to as the “oceanic feeling.” Instead of interpreting it as a regressive return to infantile longing for union with the mother, as Freud and ego-psychologists did and do, Dr. Starr cast it as an enlivening and self-enlarging experience that could be viewed in terms of Winnicott’s ideas about transitional space, as creative experience. Dr. Starr later took this chapter from her dissertation and turned it into a paper for publication. It was published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues as “Faith as the fulcrum of psychic change: Metaphors of transformation in Jewish mysticism and psychoanalysis. Dr. Lewis Aron, internationally recognized teacher and lecturer on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, was on Dr. Starr’s committee, and asked her to turn her dissertation into a book for his Relational Perspectives Book Series. Her book, called Repair of the Soul: Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis, was published in 2008.
Following graduation from Post, Dr. Starr started psychoanalytic training at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she developed an internship preparation class for the doctoral program at Post and began teaching there. She also taught a clinical writing seminar and the Professional Development Seminar for the 2nd year students who were seeing patients at the clinic. Dr. Starr did her postdoctoral fellowship to earn her licensing hours at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she conducted short-term (8-session) psychodynamic psychotherapy with doctoral students who came for counseling. When she got her license in 2009, she started a private practice in Manhattan, where she does individual psychotherapy/psychoanalysis, couples therapy, internship consulting, and dissertation consulting.
Dr. Starr is very involved at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. In February of this year, she was awarded the Ruth Stein prize for intellectual achievement and scholarship. In addition to her private practice, she spends a great deal of time writing and presenting. For the past two years, she has been co-writing a book with Dr. Aron called A Psychotherapy for the People: Toward a Progressive Psychoanalysis. In the book they examine how psychoanalysis has arrived at the marginalized position in which it finds itself today, and envision a psychoanalysis for the 21st century, one that is inclusive of a variety of perspectives and has broad application, including to underserved populations. They are currently in the final phases of the book and are very much looking forward to the finished product!