In August 2015, Jacob earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He chose this program because of its guiding belief that human experience is complex and fundamentally suffused with meaning. Attempting to understand people’s experiences from this standpoint involves appreciating the interweave of personal, cultural, and existential meanings. Accordingly, Jacob practices psychotherapy not as a technical procedure used to remove isolated symptoms, but rather as a process of exploration where the many threads of a person’s experience—including the painful and limiting ones—are gradually and repeatedly unwoven and rewoven to foster a more integrated and free life.
Jacob completed the 4,000 clinical hours required for licensure between 2014 and 2017 at the Norwich University counseling center, then a nationally accredited training site. He received didactic instruction and supervision from senior clinicians on contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to psychotherapy. Jacob chose this site because he finds that psychoanalytic theory and practice offer particularly rich ways of conceptualizing and addressing life and its many difficulties.
In July 2017, Jacob was licensed by the state of Vermont and opened his practice at River Street Wellness. In 2018 he completed a post-graduate certificate program in the psychoanalytic psychotherapies offered by the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies. He has taught approaches to psychotherapy at the clinical psychology graduate program at Saint Michael’s College from 2018-2022. He is a member of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies and chairs the research committee and is the president elect of the organization.
For more information, you can view his profile on Psychology Today here.