Retired dance musician Carla Levy is now a licensed psychoanalyst, a career she says requires skills such as active listening and helping people that she first used as a New York City public school educator.
Dance musician and psychoanalyst may seem like worlds apart, but they share surprising common threads, says retiree Carla Levy, who made the transition after 31 years as a New York City public school educator.
Both professions require listening deeply and being there for people, says Levy, who began training to become a licensed psychoanalyst about two years after retiring from Fiorello H. LaGuardia HS of Music & Art and Performing Arts in 2013.
“You have to help guide people through a process, and sometimes that process involves a lot of pitfalls, a lot of challenges and a lot of conflicts,” she says.
As a teacher of dance history and a musician who accompanied dance classes, Levy gave her students a tangible skill they could take with them after graduation. She strives to do the same with her patients today.
“In the psychoanalytic process, hopefully the analyst is giving their patients something that is very, very real that one can take with oneself throughout the rest of one’s life journey,” she says.
Levy has always been an analytical thinker, eager to understand herself and others. “Understanding psychological processes was always a part of me,” she says.
Her interest in psychoanalysis began years ago, through her exposure to her ex-husband’s work as a therapist and the hours she spent poring over books on the subject at a local bookstore.
Levy is nearing the end of her psychoanalytic training, which started about nine years ago. She has passed the state licensing exam and sees about 10 patients a week in 50-minute sessions. Her preference is to meet patients in person at her Greenwich Village office, but she also conducts sessions by phone and on Zoom.
Meanwhile, she continues her training at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. After she fulfills a few more requirements, she will receive a certificate of membership in the association and will be able to teach, supervise and serve on committees.
Separate from her studies, she teaches an online class on Freud to Chinese students through the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance.
If there’s one thing that unites everyone, Levy says, it is that “to be human is to be in conflict.” Psychoanalysts explore with their patients the meaning and significance of that conflict and how it affects their lives, she says. They strive to understand the person from the inside out — how they think, what they feel, how they assemble information, what they perceive and what they may distort.
“I love trying to make sense of their inner worlds,” she says.