About — Dr. Herzel Yerushalmi

At any moment we carry with us mainly our own psychobiography

What shapes, models and forges a person’s personality? Who are we? What are we? How do we develop, operate and become who and what we, and others close to us, perceive ourselves to be? What are the stories that animate any particular person’s life? What is my story, my memories and experiences? What is yours? Do we have a coherent story? How fragmented is our story? How one’s life flew the way that it flew, and not otherwise?

Are we just the sum of our behaviors, achievements and the inescapable emotional symptoms that accompany them in modern times living!

Is feeling complete, truly, possible?

With these questions in mind, Dr. Yerushalmi has begun his long and passionate journey into psychology, history, and psychotherapy. He advocates for a wholistic approach to a person—not a patient—in his/her efforts in making sense of the daily struggles with relationships, the self, the body, and the pulsating, too often bruising, everyday reality.

Dr. Yerushalmi has a doctorate in clinical psychology; he is a full-time psychotherapist and licensed counselor for more than 35 years; he is a fine arts artist, writer, and musician.

While completing his bachelor's degree in History at Tel-Aviv University, he noticed that major misunderstandings of human beings’ whereabouts, past and present, occur when we view our history from above, not from below. The up-down approach will see aberration and aberrants into genuine attempts by people to shake off indifferent and/or authoritarian authorities; and will describe an expression and effort to protest, assert, change and transform— as disturbance and disorder.

Could the same up-down approach happen in psychotherapy as in our living experiences, past, and present?

That what the medical model of psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry designates as symptoms of a disorder may in fact be an attempt unbeknown to the presenter for self-expression, self-realization, and liberation. That what may bring one to resist and revolt, unbeknown yet as such to him or her, and cross the threshold of the therapist’s office is, in many cases, a deep desire, again unbeknown yet, to find one’s genuine voice, re-balance the role of conventions, understand the meanings of past and present experiences and as a result feel liberated and become liberated from psychic symptoms, psychological labels and irrational and weakening fears and anxieties.

In relationships—and therapy is a relationship, looking from above at the client could be at the root of profound misunderstandings with profound personal, emotional, and material consequences.

Power differentials are at the center of an individual’s life experiences, personal, emotional, familial, social, economical, and political. Dr. Yerushalmi asserts that our psyche is formed within a dynamic interplay of these differentials. What is oppressing (=depressing)? How oppression (depression) happens? Who are the oppressors and the oppressed (depressed)? How are we coping internally as well as externally dealing with these power acts, in our intimate and family relationships, at work, and with friends?

How these dynamics unfold in the most delicate of all, that is the interpersonal relationships, is at the center of the author’s motivation in writing The Psychobiographic Approach to Psychotherapy. A Study of the Power Structure of Psychotherapy.

At Six, he found himself sitting on his father’s lap during one of his father’s short siestas and staring at the colorfully inscribed pages his father labored to read for him. A book has since become a source of magical curiosity and comfort enveloping him with words, live words as well as written words. Therapy at its best, says Dr. Yerushalmi, serves the same functions. It comforts, supports and challenges. Therapy is a psychic, experiential biography in action.

At seven Dr. Yerushalmi took his first painting class. He describes being fascinated by watercolors set in little cubes in the rectangular metal box. "I am not going back to that class" he soon remonstrated, "it is not fun." Grids and realism ruled the class and the teaching method. The young student’s imagination willfully resisted being confined to boxes and copying objects and landscapes. That is when for the first time, he says, he tasted the flavor of saying “no,” and resisted dogma and convention.

These are a few examples of how personal experiences define who we are and how we operate.

Dr. Yerushalmi believes that it is not enough to learn and pass a test on how to stroke a brush on the canvas and mix the chemical compounds of the oil colors to beget a painting, a piece of art, so it is not enough to learn some psychological techniques and past a test to stir and beget a lasting and meaningful self and interpersonal change. He brings to our attention that a quick internal gaze at a woman or man's biography attests to the richness and complexity of our life experiences. Such understanding forgoes any attempt in understanding them based on this or that technique and/or quick fixes. A biography-based therapy addresses and resists simplistic approaches to a human psychic canvas.

As social beings, our character is affected and shaped by cultural values, fashions, and norms. Dr. Yerushalmi inquires, how does a cultural system that idolizes moneymaking, busyness, and consumption and objectifies women, men, and children—affects our thoughts, feelings, everyday living, and our relationships? We are taught and promised ostensibly fabulous incentives, to measure financial and material costs and have become numb to the psychic and emotional cost of our wants and needs. We are taught that either-or are our main or only option in pursuit of personal and professional success and happiness.

The Psychobiographic Psychotherapy aims at helping people who with much courage strive to battle the dehumanization of our everyday relational life at home and at work; stifling our ability for full expression of love, intimacy and sex, material needs, true success, and spiritual fulfillment.

Dr. Yerushalmi believes that any individual has value only in the context of his/her community, within a collective, only as people. That we have a biography, a self, as a result of interacting with others. Disharmony between I and WE begets difficulties and throbbing conflicts in living. How while growing up, and at present, one negotiates the me and the other(s) is at the core of our happiness, sense of belonging, and genuineness. How this disharmony has been confining creativity, internal liberation, and togetherness in combating loneliness and alienation, fear and anxiety, is at the core of the biographic therapy and healing journey.

Psychobiography, Dr. Yerushalmi writes, is an innovative non-technical, and non-stigmatizing personal-biographic-therapeutic approach that inspires learning, healing, and living a fulfilling life creatively and artfully. Human beings are relationship oriented. From very early on and all along the course of our life we search for and live in relationships, with our mother, father, siblings, family members, intimate other, employer, associates, and friends.

Therapy is a relationship, an interpersonal one, a new relationship that never happened before, that challenges the boundaries of our self and our perceptions of the world around us and thus may cultivate new growth experiences. Therapy could be a transformative experience in relatedness, to our self, our body, our significant other, and our surroundings. The Psychobiographic Approach, according to Dr. Yerushalmi, helps us to redefine and lay out new boundaries in so much as maturity and mental health are about boundaries— intrusions and/or the lack of them—that we have experienced throughout our lived biography.

Dr. Herzel Yerushalmi 201-677-2232 121 Newark Ave.