Biography
Lorraine Cates, Ph.D. is a contemporary psychoanalyst, organizational consultant and a former adjunct professor at Columbia University. She received her PhD in 2008 from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Focusing her research on emotional knowledge and emotional intelligence, her findings demonstrate the importance of processing so-called "negative affect states" (such as fear and doubt) as those states emerge in leadership, decision-making and personal relationships. She presented those findings at the 2007 International Society for Research on Emotion in Queensland, Australia.
As a 1988 graduate, training and supervising analyst of NPAP (National Psychological Association of Psychoanalysis) in New York, she conducted numerous workshops on emotion and selfhood.
Currently engaged in an independent practice in Manhattan, Dr. Cates is furthering her theoretical inquiry of emotion into the link between bodily memory and emotional trauma, which she clarifies in "Insidious Emotional Trauma: The Body Remembers" (IJPSP: 9:1, 2014). Her primary research interest is emotional trauma, and, in particular, on the feelings of alienation, isolation and shame associated with all forms of trauma—e.g., developmental, abuse and adult-onset such as combat trauma. In "Nonverbal Affective Phenomena Revisited" (IJPSP: 6:4, 2011), she emphasizes the salience of bodily emotion as it relates to depression, dissociation and anxiety. In this work, the meaning of emotional vulnerability is reevaluated. Rather than a source of shame, Dr. Cates elucidates emotional vulnerability as a source of strength that is vital in processing the problematic feelings endemic to living a better life.
