Biography

Since 1979, Dr. Sommer Anderson has specialized in treating chronic back pain and other stress-related physical symptoms, using an approach that integrates contemporary psychoanalytic theory, research in the neuroscience of emotional and cognitive processing, and the neurobiology of attachment, trauma and pain.  She incorporates techniques from mindfulness meditation and body-based talking therapies for treatment of trauma.

Working in the field of physical rehabilitation medicine since 1974, she did an APA-approved clinical psychology internship at Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine-NYU Medical Center. After completing this internship, Dr. Sommer Anderson joined the Psychology Staff at Rusk where she worked until 1987, when she left for full-time private practice and psychoanalytic training.

On the Psychology Staff at Rusk Institute—New York University Langone, Dr. Anderson first specialized in psychodiagnostic evaluation and treatment of children and adults with muscular dystrophy and conducted a groundbreaking research study on sexuality and neuromuscular disease, funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

In 1979, while still at Rusk, she began treating people with musculoskeletal back pain (Tension Myositis Syndrome, now known as Tension Myoneural Syndrome, or TMS), working on the rehabilitation team led by Attending Physician, John E. Sarno, MD and supervised by psychologist Arlene Feinblatt, PhD.

In Relational Perspectives on the Body, co-edited with Lewis Aron and published by The Analytic Press in 1998, she presented her first written case study using a relational psychoanalytic approach to treating one of John E. Sarno, MD's pain patients. The Italian edition of this book was published in 2004. In her chapter, she illustrated how overwhelming emotions that are difficult to experience can be linked to back pain and demonstrated how her psychotherapeutic approach relieved the pain.

Dr. Sommer Anderson's passion for integrating mind and body in the treatment process was extended further in her role as Contributing Editor of Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension, published in June 2007 by The Analytic Press/Taylor & Francis Group.  In the opening chapter, she described how she developed a TMS symptom that was related to early childhood emotional trauma.

Working closely with Eric Sherman, Psy.D., who was also trained by Sarno and Feinblatt, they published a book of case studies, Pathways to Pain Relief in 2013, illustrating how they treated patients with chronic pain who were diagnosed and referred by Dr. Sarno.  The Spanish translation, Caminos Hacia El Alivio Del Dolor, was published in 2020.

In December 2022, colleagues who had studied closely with John E. Sarno, MD for several decades, wrote a tribute in honor of Dr. Sarno who would have been 100 years of age on June 23, 2022. Andrea Leonard-Segal, MD, Eric Sherman, PsyD, Arlene Feinblatt, PhD, and Frances Sommer Anderson, PhD, SEP published, Breaking Out of Pain:  Living the Legacy of John E. Sarno, MD.

In private practice, Dr. Sommer Anderson has treated adults in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She also supervises and trains psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and other mental health workers, medical and rehabilitation personnel, and yoga teachers, focusing on the treatment of pain, acute and chronic medical conditions and physical disability, and trauma. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Dr. Anderson began to include shorter-term, focused treatments for somatic pain and trauma, remotely.  Currently, she is practicing virtually.  Her recent teaching has focused on the impact of early life adversity on the development of chronic pain and other health issues later in life.

Dr. Sommer Anderson is recognized locally, nationally and internationally for her experiential-didactic teaching style.  She taught two courses on the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice in the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Training Institute's (NIP TI) psychoanalytic training program and was a co-instructor, 2003-04, in the first NIP TI Trauma Program course, "Trauma: An Integrative Perspective.”  She extended her interest in the use of the analyst's bodily experience by developing a teaching and supervising technique, Sensing the Other, that enhances the analyst's awareness of the role of bodily experience in the therapist-patient relationship.  When teaching health care professionals about treating pain, she uses a technique, Experiencing the Pain Matrix™, that she developed while studying the latest advances in the neuroscience of emotional and cognitive processing and the neurobiology of trauma and pain.

Currently a member of the Teaching and Consulting Faculty for the Certificate Program in Trauma Studies at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, she developed a course on implicit and nonverbal processes in treating trauma. Additional teaching experiences are delineated on the Teaching page of this website. Earlier in her career she held teaching appointments as Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry (part-time), New York University Medical School; Psychologist, Bellevue Hospital Center; and Adjunct Clinical Supervisor, Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program, City College, CUNY.