Allen Thomas Jones, Ph.D.
Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Counselor
Allen Jones, Ph.D. is a psychoanalytic counselor who works with adults, children, and couples. In addition to his role as a psychoanalytic counselor, Dr. Jones has taught college-level philosophy and ethics for more than a decade.
Who is Dr. Jones and how can he help?
Dr. Jones offers help with relationships, work, and self-understanding. The clients with whom he works are often creative and interested in becoming more productive, while finding richness in their lives. He helps his clients overcome anxiety, depression, procrastination and trauma. He can also assist with improving motivation and performance in competitive sports. With training in numerous modalities including psychoanalysis, philosophical counseling and meditation, Dr. Jones tailors the assistance that he gives to the individual.
Education:
Dr. Jones trained for two years at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. He completed his PhD summa cum laude in philosophy from the University of Leuven in 2016. His research examined the mind/body problem through the lens of psychoanalysis in addition to child developmental processes and theories of trauma. Following the completion of his doctoral studies at Leuven, Dr. Jones spent time as a visiting fellow at Georgetown University and Boston College, where he offered seminars on the thought of Freud. During his doctoral studies, he lived and practiced at a Mount Baldy Zen Monastery under Zen master Joshu Sasaki.
Dr. Jones is based in Brussels, Belgium (Uccle) but also works by videoconference with people wherever they are.
Are you suffering from anxiety, stress or persistent anger?
No one escapes the tests of life, and it is not uncommon to feel burdened with anxiety, stress or anger. Everyone feels tested at moments in the course of life. However, if you often find that it feels as if you are at the limit of what you can endure, you may profit from assistance from an experienced psychoanalyst. Feelings such as anxiety, stress, or anger provide important signals that there may be a hidden mental knot that needs to be untied for you to flourish. Untying this knot can be done by slowly bringing the hidden material into the light of consciousness for careful examination. This, in turn, provides you with the opportunity to overcome it. While simply having someone who will listen compassionately as you speak freely about yourself may already provide some relief, an experienced psychoanalyst can help you interpret what comes to light and to reframe it in terms that can help you to integrate it into your self-understanding.
Do you often feel depressed or devitalized?
While it is quite normal to mourn after the loss of a loved one, a debilitating injury, or a major career setback, if you find that you are in a persistent state of hopelessness and are not able to find an explanation for this feeling, psychoanalysis may be of some help. Psychoanalytic research has established that, like mourning, depression frequently involves the loss of some beloved object. Whereas in mourning one is all too aware of the object that one has lost—so much so that thoughts of the lost love object monopolize one’s life—in depression one cannot see clearly what has been lost. A good analyst can help you to discover the deeper sources of this inner sense of loss. This, in turn, can transform depression into a natural process of mourning, thus placing you on the path toward recovery from depression.
Are you having difficulties with your relationships?
Do you find yourself engaging in behaviors that destabilize your relationships with family or loved ones without really understanding why? Or, alternatively, do you feel yourself withdrawing at precisely the moment that real intimacy becomes possible? Usually, we have superficial explanations for our relational problems. However, without fully understanding, we may sense that there are deeper causes than these superficial explanations provide. In any case, difficulties such as these make it hard to maintain long-term bonds, which can make us feel isolated and alone in a challenging world. Together, we can get to the causes of these difficulties. More than this, by becoming aware of the real causes, you will begin to establish healthier patterns that assure stability and a depth of mutual understanding in your relationships.
Are you struggling with self-esteem or questions about your identity?
Finding and maintaining a sense of one’s self has never been more difficult than it is now. Instability in one’s sense of self or one’s sense of value is not only challenging for the afflicted, but it frequently renders their relationships more unstable. Some part of this vicious circle can be explained by the fact that we live in a bewildering world in which rapid change and instability seem to be the only constants. Though our rapidly changing social and cultural landscape can add to the difficulties of developing of a stable sense of one’s self, problems with self-esteem or with identity usually have deeper roots than this. Psychoanalysis provides excellent techniques for examining the deeper roots of this problem. More than just helping you to explore deeply rooted feelings of instability, a good psychoanalyst can often assist in your efforts to overcome this difficulty.
Allen Thomas Jones Ph.D 