About Dr. Mark O'Connell
As a graduate of Boston University’s Doctoral Program in Clinical psychology, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Hospital, and as a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, I am well versed in traditional psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Over the past several years, however, my interests and my understandings have broadened. Through working with victims of trauma, through exposure to mindfulness, DBT and other more modern treatment modalities, through an expanding interest in couples and marital therapy, and through a commitment to writing about psychological ideas for a general, rather than a purely academic, audience, I have become increasingly eclectic and flexible in my approach.
This has been true of me as a therapist, a writer and a speaker.
My work has included:
Over twenty-five years of experience working as a therapist and a psychoanalyst with adults, adolescents and couples.
Two popular books:
The Good Father. Scribners, 2005.
The Marriage Benefit. Springboard Press, 2008.
Several academic papers, including:
Herzog J. and O’Connell M.: Children Are Being Murdered: How Do People Live and Play in the Aftermath of Atrocity? Published in - Children, War and Persecution Rebuilding Hope, Proceedings of the Conference on the Effects of War and Persecution on Children at Moputo, Mozambique, December 1st through 4th, 1996. Also published in: Migration und Ferfolgung: Psychoanalytische Perspektiven. Ed. Karin Bell, Alex Holder, Paul Janssen und Jan van de Sande. Bibliothek der Psychoanalyse, 2001.
O’Connell M.: Subjective Reality, Objective Reality, Modes of Relatedness and Therapeutic Action. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. LXIX, 677-711, (2000).
Numerous academic talks, including:
Children Are Being Murdered: How Do People Live and Play in the Aftermath of Atrocity? Jim Herzog M.D., and Mark O’Connell Ph.D.. Keynote address at the Conference on the Effects of War and Persecution on Children at Moputo, Mozambique, December 1st through 4th, 1996.
Being Each Other’s Bitches; Defensive Uses of Transference and Countertransference, Spring Meetings, Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, May 2008.
Numerous talks for the general public, including:
“Risky Business: Helping Teenagers Negotiate Their Relationships with Sex, Drugs and Alcohol”. June 2008 at the Brookline High School, Brookline, Massachusetts
“The Pornification of American Culture: Developing Healthy Teenage Sexuality”. September 2008 at the Sexual Health Matters Conference, Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts
Appearances on television and radio, including Fox, NPR, The Today Show. Among the topics I have addressed are parenting, teenage sexuality, discipline, dating, drugs, alcohol, marriage and more.
Opinion pieces for print media, including “The Epidemic of Meaningless Teenage Sex”, Boston Globe, March 9, 2005.
All of my work, in all of these varied mediums, is organized around the belief that our conversations about our minds and our lives should be governed by respectfulness, accessibility and transparency.