Dr. Christian-Kliger’s extraordinary interdisciplinary work has forged a model that fuses psychoanalysis with art and Buddhist practice, changing not only individual lives but how organizations and communities’ function, and opening honest dialogue across race, culture, and difference. A former singer and performer, she was drawn to psychology after entertaining troops in Vietnam with the USO introduced her to trauma, and she never left her art behind. Today, as a psychoanalyst, author, and artist, she brings psychic and emotional layers of experience into view through a relational, trauma-informed approach. Uniting her efforts is psychoanalytic presence in action: creating emotionally alive spaces where people learn to stay with what has felt unbearable, recognize unconscious patterns, and move toward empathy, repair, and shared humanity.
Her reach is intentionally broad. Through PsychAssets and Kliger Consulting Group, she provides intensive clinical treatment for young adults and families and leadership consultation for Fortune 500 companies. With the senior leaders of one global manufacturer, her approach, which invites leaders to respond to her paintings and poetry, helped build trust across the leadership team and was followed by a sharp decline in workplace accidents. She has also brought experiential life skills learning to neurodiverse youth. As principal consultant and later founding board chair, she helped the Harlem Family Institute, a psychoanalytic training institute serving underserved communities, expand its public programs, including the Psychoanalytic Renaissance talk series on psychoanalysis and diversity. Christian-Kliger helped create Harlem Family Services’ subsidiary, The Margaret Morgan Lawrence Center for Family and Child Development, a mental health clinic in Harlem licensed under Article 31 by the New York State Office of Mental Health. There, experienced psychoanalysts and psychodynamic psychotherapists serve children, families, adults, and the wider community affected by, or at risk of, historical and ongoing stress-based trauma.
Within the profession, Christian-Kliger co-created a leadership course for the American Psychoanalytic Association linking systems’ psychodynamics with the study of racism and “othering,” and served on the International Psychoanalytical Association’s committee on prejudice, discrimination, and racism. A founder of Black Psychoanalysts Speak, she edited We Are Human First: Black Psychoanalysts Write, a special issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry which includes the “Holmes Commission Leadership” conversation. Her art exhibitions, her esteemed book Power Your Heart, You Power Your Mind (2018), and her award-winning podcast, We Are Human First, carry that message to the public, empowering those long-unseen and unheard.