Dan Quinn

My lifelong immersion in the study of psychology began when I was a teenager, during the 70’s revolution in psychotherapy, when it seemed we needed to try everything we could think of—some of it pretty wild—to realize our own human potential. I pivoted from there into the excitement of the business sector for a while, led a company and did management consulting, and was fascinated by the thrilling, punishing pace and the incredible highs of winning. But I realized that I was still moved the most by the sometimes brutally painful personal obstacles people were facing in the arena, and the opportunities for transformational growth that those can bring. I returned to psychology and psychoanalysis over 25 years ago, and I’ve been doing therapy and analysis with business leaders ever since.

The heart of my work is Jungian and relational psychoanalysis, but I think the best work integrates findings from every area of this field, and I did advanced training in the tools of cognitive-behavioral, EMDR and Internal Family Systems approaches, among others, and trained in Positive Psychology coaching with its founder, Martin Seligman. Each has value, and we pull out whatever tool works best in the situation.

I interned at the Jung Institute of San Francisco, and obtained my doctorate at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, where I then joined the faculty to teach courses on a number of different topics in psychotherapy theory, group dynamics and psychological research methods, and supervise the clinical work and research of doctoral candidates. I was also founder and Executive Director of The Bridge Therapy Center, a therapy and training institution which had offices throughout the Bay Area. I’ve published in The Jung Journal and The Journal of Analytical Psychology, and am working on a book that argues that Freud had Oedipus all wrong, and that Oedipus had a core trauma of abandonment. (So did Freud.)

Most importantly, I’ve had decades of my own psychoanalysis, and therapy of my own from just about any orientation known to psychology. 

My post-graduate studies continue at The College of Hard Knocks, where I worked over the years as a theater actor and director, journalist, high school teacher, highway flagman, short-order cook, nurse’s aide, house painter and cab driver. Still nuts about the theater, I spend a lot of time in Manhattan, but I retreat to the bucolic theater town of Ashland, Oregon where I live on the edge of a forest, with my wife, the writer Lesley Quinn.