Michael Geis, MD — Psychotherapy as Coming Back to Life


AboutArticlesVideo Recordings

I am a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Santa Barbara devoted to the life-spirit of those who work with me.  My background consists of a medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine followed by work as a physician to Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone, Africa. I then completed adult and child psychiatry fellowships at the University of Chicago and Philadelphia Child Guidance clinic.

After ten years in private practice of psychotherapy at the Family Therapy Center in San Francisco, I moved to Santa Barbara to continue my therapeutic work with adults and children. I have taught psychotherapy from psychoanalytic and Jungian perspectives at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Antioch University, and Santa Barbara City College’s Adult Education programs.

I am aware that most people come into psychotherapy submerged and encased in their difficulties. Trying to live our lives from within self-protected chambers often leads to a sense of feeling half-alive and sometimes unreal. I have learned how to join with a person in their search for a way out of that prison. I try to stay alert to how the creative forces within our connection also place new demands on myself, demands for me to change that I work to stay aware of and struggle to meet for a healing to occur in your life and sometimes in mine as well.


Here are transcripts from some of my public presentations.



The Arrival of a Person’s Destiny in Certain Moments in Psychotherapy
A talk presented by Dr. Michael Geis on October 24, 2012,
as part of Cottage Hospital Santa Barbara’s Psychiatric Grand Rounds

Click here for PDF transcript. Click here for video



 

Honoring the Invisible Guest: What the spirit asks of the therapst
A talk presented by Dr. Michael Geis on October 12, 2011,
as part of Cottage Hospital Santa Barbara’s Psychiatric Grand Rounds

Click here for PDF transcript.   Click here for video



The Homage -- by Marc Chagall

The Homage — by Marc Chagall



TALKS AT COTTAGE HOSPITAL ON THE MEANINGS AND PRACTICE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY



An Introduction to these video-taped public lectures

This lecture series focuses on certain fundamental issues which arise when one pursues a psychotherapy oriented to reaching a person’s essence.

In addition to what a person may say he or she wants from psychotherapy, there is something else, a quality of life and being that often attempts to surface and embody in a course of treatment. Many names have been given to these life energies: spirit, essence, being, soul, the Guest, the true self. But whatever they are called in most of us they live as shadows, existing only as kernels of potential life, safely encased in shells to ward off further damage.

Thus beyond a person’s usual personality is a defended second self, a second realm that may cautiously attempt to reveal its presence at the intimate edge of meetings with a therapist in hopes of having at last the chance to be celebrated and lived. A patient will at times risk living toward a therapist what heretofore had to be vigorously protected and hence unlived. Nevertheless these spontaneous gestures of aliveness are then frequently erased by powerful sources of resistance to their emergence. It’s as if we have inner guardians that act to reestablish the “safety” of at least a known living-death in the form of our usual personality.

The poet Shelley spoke of a “film of familiarity” that sticks to our life and acts as a veil between our self and who else we are, preventing contact with the new and unexpected, especially the presencings of invisible guests that may choose to enter the sacred space between therapist and patient. Thus what I as a therapist try to stay alert to is what is alive in a session, that rare, random descent of what shines in a word that has just impacted me.

What then is asked of a therapist who devotes his or her work to helping others bring into existence a life that feels real to them? To address this we turn to poets and other artists in addition to psychotherapists for their help in entering a certain relational reality with a patient such that in that psychic space between us his or her life-spirit attempts to presence.

To sum up, when a therapist attempts to meet with hospitality the usually imprisoned life-forces, not-yet-lived-images, and encased spiritual realities, such contact also impacts the therapist in a deep way and thereby alters profoundly both members of the treatment dyad.