Hello — it's so nice to meet you

Welcome. The Cambridge Institute for Psychotherapy Services and Education is a small, independent practice and learning community in Harvard Square. We do clinical work — adults, couples, complex psychological terrain — and we train and supervise the next generation of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. The two are inseparable here.

We hold that human beings are wired for healing, and that the deepest changes happen in relationship — slowly, with another person present. Our work is grounded in the relational and psychoanalytic traditions: not as a method imposed on a person, but as a way of being together that takes seriously the depth and meaning of an inner life.

What this looks like in practice is unhurried. We do not offer techniques, formulas, or quick fixes. We offer time, attention, and a steady mind across the room — for as long as the work asks for. Some people come for a season; some stay for years. Both are honored.

CIPSE was founded by Dr. Keren Porat, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with nearly two decades of practice in greater Boston. She trained at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), where she has served on faculty since graduating in 2021, and her clinical lineage runs through the late Mal Slavin and the international relational tradition. The institute carries that lineage forward.

Whatever you're building, we're here to help you take the first step with confidence.

  • We're a team of passionate thinkers and doers, dedicated to building with purpose and clarity. Collaboration and curiosity drive everything we do.

  • We believe in keeping things simple, smart, and human. Every project starts with listening and ends with something we're proud to share.

  • From startups to seasoned brands, we partner with people who care about doing things right—and doing them well.

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Psychoanalysis is a practice of art

If art is how a culture comes to know itself — how it makes meaning, mourns its losses, and gives form to what cannot otherwise be spoken — then the study of the suffering and the healing of the mind belongs inside that conversation, not adjacent to it.

This is the conviction at the heart of CIPSE. Psychoanalysis is not a clinical procedure performed on a patient. It is a creative discipline, closer in kind to poetry, painting, and music than to medicine. The room is a theatre. The session is the work. The unconscious is the material. Much of what we work with in any session arrives before language: in the body, in the air between two people, in the half-formed image, in the symptom that has been speaking for years without being heard. The work of analysis is to slowly, patiently, give these things somewhere to go. To make the unspeakable a little more sayable. To make the unbearable a little more bearable. To make a buried life — once again — a livable one.

Dr. Mal Slavin often returned to a deceptively simple idea: play is a serious thing. He took it from Winnicott, who put it this way:

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”

— D . W. W I N N I C O T T, Playing and Reality ( 1 9 7 1 )

Play is the ground on which a self becomes possible — and the ground on which, in analysis, a self can become possible again. To take it seriously is not to take it lightly.