I'm Yann. He/They.
French-born. New York-based.
A psychotherapist, writer, researcher, and someone who's never been good at leaving a question alone. Especially when the answer is, "Well, that's just how things are."
Says who?
I grew up in southwestern France, eventually made my way to London, and now call New York City home. Along the way, I became a therapist. Then a researcher. Somewhere in between, I started writing more publicly about the things that troubled me. Not quite the career trajectory I had mapped out as a child. Then again, I don't recall having much of a map.
A little about how I got here
I came to psychotherapy through a fascination with people. The things we say. The things we don't. What we learn to conceal, sometimes so successfully that we forget we're doing it.And the extraordinary lengths we'll go to in order to belong. My clinical training gave me ways to think about suffering, relationships, trauma, and change. It also left me with questions that weren't always easy to answer within the boundaries of a therapy room. How much of what we call psychological distress belongs to the individual? How much belongs to the world they have had to navigate? And when someone struggles to fit into a system, why are we so quick to assume that the person is the problem? I completed a BSc in Counseling, followed by an MSc in Gender & Sexuality Studies. My undergraduate research explored gay shame in psychotherapy. My master's dissertation turned toward queer identity, resistance, and the sometimes uncomfortable business of becoming ourselves. Both deepened my interest in the relationship between our intimate lives and the social expectations that shape them. I went on to undertake postgraduate training in trauma-informed clinical practice at New York University, alongside training in EMDR. Today, I'm pursuing a PhD in Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center. Which means I spend a considerable amount of time reading, writing, questioning what I've just read, and occasionally wondering why I thought a doctorate was a sensible idea. I do love it, though.
The therapist. The researcher. The writer.
People sometimes ask how these different parts of my work fit together. I could give you a beautifully polished explanation. But really, they keep interrupting one another.
The therapist hears the consequences of things that the researcher wants to understand.
The researcher asks whether the concepts the therapist relies upon are quite as innocent as they appear.
And the writer? The writer occasionally gets impatient with both.In the therapy room, I'm interested in what becomes possible when someone feels sufficiently safe to be curious about themselves.
In research, I'm interested in who gets to produce knowledge, what counts as evidence, and how institutions shape people's access to care. On the page, I have a little more freedom to be provocative. To follow a thought somewhere uncomfortable. To say the thing that might make someone raise an eyebrow.
Different ways of working, certainly. But I keep coming back to the same concern: how do we make room for people to live without constantly having to justify the shape of their lives?I don't have a tidy answer. I suspect I'd distrust one if I did.
A person, too
Outside the clinical and academic worlds, I like walking through cities with a camera, looking at buildings, watching people, and discovering places I hadn't intended to find. I enjoy baking. Especially cookies. The thick, gooey, over the top kind that barely hold themselves together. I'm fond of a good conversation. A dry martini or Sazerac. An unexpected question. And I'm rather attached to the idea that seriousness and humor needn't be enemies. You can care deeply about something without speaking about it as though you're delivering a eulogy. You can be a therapist and still be human. In fact, I'd rather hope so.
If you've made it this far...
Thank you for being curious. You're welcome to explore my clinical work, read what I've written, or take a look at the research I'm involved in. And if something here resonates, challenges you, or makes you want to start a conversation, you know where to find me.