Dr. Galef is a clinical psychologist who works with adults and couples. He has worked within a variety of clinical settings, including inpatient and outpatient units at public and private hospitals, community mental health centers, and college counseling clinics.

Dr. Galef earned his doctorate from the Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology at the University of Hartford and completed his clinical psychology internship at Penn Medicine-Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Dr. Galef’s training includes an emphasis on working with trauma, personality disorders, and the psychological aspects of cancer and other medical illnesses. He also has years of experience working with mood and psychotic disorders, grief, concerns related to gender and sexuality, relationship and occupational dissatisfaction, and family issues. Dr. Galef is a clinical supervisor at Uptown Downtown.

Dr. Galef’s approach is primarily grounded in psychoanalytic theory and he views psychotherapy as a process of finding new ways to understand your current predicament and what is getting in the way of you progressing to where you would like to be. Dr. Galef believes that an open, nonjudgemental space in which to express the full range of your experiences is essential to personal growth, and that it can be a powerful thing to learn that you can survive any corner of your mind.

Dr. Galef’s research is on different subtypes of PTSD amongst World Trade Center responders and how these different symptomatic presentations are related to individual personality traits. He maintains an interest in how character informs our responses to traumatic events and, reciprocally, how trauma influences character as we develop.