Background
My path to and through psychology has cut a serpentine trail, originating in South Carolina where I obtained an undergraduate degree from Columbia College. Thereafter, I turned west, attending Wichita State University where I obtained a M.A. in Speech-Language Pathology. Returning to South Carolina, I served as speech-language pathologist and later Director of a Bureau of Education for the Handicapped grant to develop and implement a parent-mediated intervention program for handicapped preschool children living on islands off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. In that position I developed and subsequently published a language curriculum and a parent-training guide.
Curiosity and a desire to understand human development in affiliated areas (attachment, emotion, socialization, and physiology) led me back to academia. I obtained a Ph.D. in Life-Span Developmental Psychology from George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Subsequently, I returned to South Carolina for a Post-Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University of South Carolina. Relocating to the north, I completed an internship in Clinical and Community Psychology at Rutgers Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. Thereafter, I pursued psychoanalytically informed specialty training for the treatment of children and adults at the Institute for the Study of Children, Adolescents, and Families in New York City.
As a psychologist, I have worked in medical settings including the Department of Neonatology at the Medical University of South Carolina, the Neonatology Department of Jersey Shore Medical Center, and in both the Institute of Child Development and the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Through Continuing Education, I pursued training in Forensic Psychology. For years, I have maintained a private practice. In these positions, I have published books, chapters, articles, and reviews. I have conducted hundreds of psychological evaluations and have made numerous professional presentations on a variety of topics, including a presentation on Childhood Depression to the Research Society of the New York Psychoanalytic Association.
Approach
My work with children, adolescents, and adults stems from intrigue and is based on engagement with my clients in a way that forms a therapeutic alliance. That alliance develops through empathy, connection, communication, and understanding. Clinically, I draw on a broad range of psychotherapeutic skills and interventions designed to develop an interpersonal connection that moves therapy forward in ways to help each of my clients thrive, regardless of their age. Dominantly, my orientation is psychodynamic; however, I incorporate behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic approaches as well. I love most working with my client’s dreams for the life they wish to live and the person they strive to become.
Focus on Sculpting A Dream
Surely you have a dream, or you have had a dream. All across the life span we have dreams. The toddler wants to run; the teenager wants to feel proud of his accomplishments; and the adult may dream of feeling better inside his or her skin. But, as we know, dreams can be fragile. Maybe you have lost your dream; lost touch with it or seen it buried under troubles, unexpected barriers, weighted down by depression and anxiety. Perhaps, life’s circumstances got in the way. Trauma or sorrow may have blocked attainment of the dream.
I work with you and your battered dream, sculpting away with you as you reform your dream to make it attainable. You become more emotionally agile, harness your drive, increase agency, and take on your fears. Maybe you let go of something, bringing more cylinders on board, becoming more confident.
Regardless of your age, you and your dream become my focus.
You remain my focus until finally, we see that dream take form.
Slowly, but steadily the dream begins to rise…
A fire lit lantern on a blue- black night.
Mary D. Laney, Ph.D.
Associations
- American Psychological Association
- American Speech Language Hearing Association
- Middlesex County Association of Psychologists