Amanda Bausch

I am a prelicensed psychoanalyst in New York City. I came to psychoanalysis from a background in performance, poetry, and creative nonfiction, and completed my psychoanalytic training at National Institute for the Psychotherapies in 2025. I work with adults and couples virtually and in person in Manhattan. My clinical work encompasses a wide range of presenting concerns including complex trauma, depression, anxiety, existential and relational struggles. I have particular experience working with LGBTQIA+ people, sex workers, those in non-traditional relationship structures, and people in kink and BDSM communities. I am committed to anti-racist practice and do not reserve this commitment for my work with people of color. Similarly, my interest in gender, sexuality, and class is not reserved for those for whom these have been explicit sites of struggle. I am particularly attuned to the ways in which systems of power live inside us, in what we believe we deserve, in what we have learned to hide, or in who we have unconsciously become. One of the things I find most moving about this work is watching someone learn to see themselves through a kinder set of eyes. The inner critic is loud, and often has been there as far back as you can remember, and it is rarely the most accurate representation of you. When we can even briefly calm it down, we can discover something else: a reservoir of information, of feeling, of self-knowledge that was there all along, waiting. I have particular interests in questions of sexuality and identity, and in the stranger, less governed movements of the mind, like dreams, free association, and the connections that surface when we stop trying to be coherent. All the places where the inner life speaks in a register the conscious mind tends to mute or overshadow. Sexuality and identity are not puzzles to be solved, as much as we might try; they are invitations into imagination, into experience, or into the self that exists below the organized self we present to the world. I welcome questions without easy answers, the thoughts that arrive from unexpected places, as well as parts of yourself we may both be meeting for the first time.