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Hello, I'm
Fadi Abou-Rihan

Psychoanalyst / Registered Psychotherapist

About

  • Name: Fadi Abou-Rihan
  • Profession: Psychoanalyst, Registered Psychotherapist
  • Email: abourihan@gmail.com
  • Phone: 416.964.6357
  • Address: 110-82 Lombard Street, Toronto Ontario M5C 2S8 CANADA

Professional Profile

I'm a psychoanalyst and a registered psychotherapist based in Toronto. I've been in private practice since the late 90s and I work with adult clients locally and internationally.

I am a member of the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, a graduate of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and hold a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

I work with people who, in spite of great difficulties, have not given up on finding meaning in their lives. I help them as they struggle with isolation, depression, anxiety, grief or early trauma. Some are trying their best to manage difficult relationships. Others are wondering about their orientation or identity--gendered, sexual, ethnic. Others still are planning the next meaningful transition in their lives.

Services

Psychotherapy

You have a life and a history that are unique. As unique is the difficulty you’re now facing: a persistent sense of emptiness or anxiety, a painful loss, a tough transition. Psychotherapy helps you make more sense of the difficulty, or make sense of it in a different way; it becomes clearer and, in the process, it becomes less draining, more manageable. Eventually, you may find that you have space for new experiences, feelings, relationships.

Psychoanalysis

From our yongest and most impressionable to our adult and self-reliant, we are shaped in complex and elusive ways. Psychoanalysis is a process of self-observation that leads to understanding and transformation. It is built on a relationship of trust, confidentiality, and non-judgement. Its aim is to take stock of strengths and weaknesses, talents and limitations, to live with the knowledge of who one is and what one can and wants to do.

Consultation

For clinicians, I offer consultations—both practice and case specific. I aim to be exploratory and pragmatic. While Freud, Winnicott and Lacan have been major inspirations, I subscribe to the principle that no one theory can reign supreme over a psyche and no single perspective should account for an entire clinical repertoire. This is why I am less interested in pushing a doctrine than in helping answer a question, introduce a possibility, trace a link or loosen an impasse.

Approach

What Moves You?

What gives you meaning? What of all that lies ahead is genuinely freeing or just a sequel to a painful past and a limiting present?

What difficulties have you been carrying for so long they've become the uniform that wears you down every day you show up for life? What about the days when you can’t or don’t want to show up at all?

Where do you feel you belong the most and how much strength and agility do you need to get there? Might you belong the most where you already are? And if so, what do you need to do to make your environment more sustaining, more enlivening?

Patience, Compassion, Curiosity

You've tackled these questions already. You tried the confidences with friends but there is only so much you’re comfortable sharing. Self-help hasn’t delivered on its promises and, as it turns out, cognitive therapy is the one-size-fits-all that just doesn't seem to fit you. Medications have helped numb the pain but have put the pleasure even further out of reach.

In spite of great difficulties, people still seek meaning in their lives. The basic question that meets anyone starting psychotherapy--what ails you?--often leads to one that is deeper and more compelling: what moves you? The answers to both are connected and psychotherapy offers the patience, compassion and curiosity needed to sort them.

New Connections, New Possibilities

What got you to your present are feelings and events, relationships and memories—faint or strong, good or bad, no matter. You’re not the sole author of what’s led you here but you carry it with you. Psychotherapy gives you the tools to sort it out and begin to move forward, to tell your story in your words and at your own pace. What you feel may make more sense and what you know may become more useful. You'll be more aware of your strengths and more careful about your limitations. Your ability to meet life's challenges may now grow.

Texts

Alongside my clinical work, I maintain an active research record. I published a book on Winnicott recently, following an earlier one on Deleuze and Guattari. I’ve also published a number of professional articles and reviews and given many conference papers in Canada, the US and Europe.

Finding Winnicott:   Philosophical Encounters     with the Psychoanalytic


The essays in this collection showcase some of Winnicott’s yet unexplored contributions to the questions of subjectivity, time, and language. They weave psychoanalytic theory, clinical vignette and key moments from the history of ideas in order to shed light on our findings regarding, and indeed findings of, desire, on some of the playful but no less compelling ways in which the subject lives, suffers, understands, questions and/or normalizes desire. More...

Deleuze and Guattari: A Pychoanalytic Itinerary


\As much as it is an insightful critique of the assimilationist vein in psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus" remains fully committed to Freud's most singular discovery of an unconscious that is procedural and dynamic. Moreover, the anti-oedipal project is a practice where the science of the unconscious is made to obey the laws it attributes to its ibject. The outcome is nothing short of the "becoming-unconscious" of psychoanalysis, a becoming that signals neither the repression nor the death of the practice but the transformation of its principles and procedures into those of its object. More...

Contact

Let's Keep In Touch

Fadi Abou-Rihan, PhD, RP
110-82 Lombard Street, Toronto
Ontario M5C 2S8, Canada
Phone
416.964.6357
Email
abourihan@gmail.com

Fadi Abou-Rihan