About Martin Silverman from his website:

When I was in high school, I had no idea what kind of career to pursue.  Biology was one of my favorite subjects; and the chairman of the department was a great teacher and a wonderful human being.  I was in my junior year when he asked for volunteers to take the battery of IQ and aptitude tests he had put together, for his Ph.D. project, to help young people figure out what to do with their lives.  I was very happy to participate.  When he met with me afterward, he told me that he thought I should become a doctor.

I was surprised, and I asked him how he’d come up with that idea.  “Well,” he said, “your two highest scores were in science and in wanting to help people.”  The first one I understood, but the second I found astonishing.  But he was right!  I do like helping people!  And what I like best is helping people overcome what’s holding them back from realizing their potential to be healthy, happy, productive individuals.   Margaret Thiessen was absolutely right when she said, a long time ago, that, in life, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional!”

When I went to medical school, I discovered that, as fascinating as it was to learn about the body and its ills, what interested me most was learning how to help the people who were suffering from those ills�and, especially, to help them wrestle with and conquer their pain and suffering in order to claim victory over those two adversaries.  When Stanley Lesser, a brilliant as well as gentle giant, gave us a series of lectures about child development and the emotional problems of childhood, I realized that I wanted to become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.  And it was my very good fortune that Stan eventually became one of the many wonderful teachers and supervisors who helped me realize my dream.

When I do something I like to do it well.  When I finished medical school, I got the best training I could find�and I got years and years and years of it!  And then, since teaching is a wonderful way to learn, I began to teach and supervise others, something I continue to do very actively to this day.   Over the years, I have taught and supervised myriads of medical students, psychiatry residents, analytic candidates, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers.  I have written extensively and, as an editor and book review editor, I have been studying and learning from other writers in my own and in related fields.  I am an active participant in the scientific meetings of multiple professional organizations, and I continue to lecture widely in the United States and in Europe.

Although I have acquired a solid foundation in traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic fundamentals, I am not an adherent of any single school of thought.   I appreciate and respect the contributions which have been made and continue to be made from a variety of viewpoints.   Every human being is complex as well as unique, and I am well aware that I need to keep learning and that I have to learn from many sources�including from my patients.

If you choose to come into treatment with me or would like me to help one of your children, you will find yourself working with someone who respects individuality and is dedicated to assisting people not only to become free from the ills that are troubling them but also to achieve their individual, unique potentials.   You will also find that my inclination is not to take over but to foster and facilitate my patients’ utilization of their own innate capacities in order to free themselves from whatever has been interfering with their optimal functioning in life.   There is much wisdom in the adage that: “if you give a man a fish he can eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish he can eat for a lifetime.”