For many years Dr. Freshman was the primary mental health clinician available to a community hospital system under whose purview behavioral health services (diagnostic, intervention, case management and treatment) were provided to emergency, medical/surgical, ICU, labor and delivery, palliative care and inpatient psychiatric units. She worked over a decade as a clinician in emergency departments, including both Level I and Level II trauma designated centers, providing services to acute psychiatric patients, medical patients with comorbid psychological and psychosocial needs and trauma patients and their family members. Early in her career, she worked for the Veteran’s Administration of Northern Arizona in their inpatient substance abuse setting with Vietnam-era veterans, for a community mental health center on a family and children’s team and as an investigator for the State of Arizona in their child welfare division covering a large rural territory much impacted by socioeconomic disparity and racial and ethnic diversity.

Upon entering private practice in 2013, Dr. Freshman returned for a decade of direct clinical training in both Psychodynamic Therapy and in Psychoanalysis. In 2016 she completed and was certified in Psychodynamic Therapy through the Denver Institute of Psychoanalysis in affiliation with the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine at the University of Colorado. She went on to complete and in 2022 earned Doctorate in Psychoanalysis (PsyD.) at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, California. *
 

Her interests include substance abuse disorders, mood and personality disorders, dissociative disorders and couples therapy through a psychoanalytic lens. She believes in the powerful and transformative impact of working in relationship with a therapist to grow curious about oneself and one’s relationship to one’s world. Her interests include philosophy, literature and the arts. Dr. Freshman is compelled by the capacity her patients discover in themselves in bringing honesty and commitment to treatment to access meaning-making that gives real potential to finding a sense of richness, of curiosity and of vitality to their lives over time. Her commitment is to supporting her patients in evolving a sense of their own wholeness, including during periods of life where suffering, grief, disappointment and self-doubt feel to be intractable. Her goal is to help her patients, above all, grow to feel more whole in who they are and increase their ability to find joy in the midst of all their human experience.

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*Candidates accepted for training at an accredited Psychoanalytic Institute include psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers who have completed clinical training in their respective professions and generally have many years of existing practice and experience, including supervisory experience.  Following an extensive application and screening process, candidates must continue to meet high ethical, psychological, and professional standards. Over the course of  4 – 6 years of preparation, they complete didactic coursework in theory, technique and human development as well as clinical casework under direct supervision from advanced and practicing psychoanalysts, called Training Analysts. Candidates are expected to present clinical cases, both orally and written and as part of her own goals for graduation Ms. Freshman is interested in contributing to the development and application of theoretical ideas as they present in the consulting room.