Professor Wynn Schwartz Ph.D
Faculty, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Schwartz has worked as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Boston for more than thirty years, offering psychotherapy and consultation to individuals and couples. His practice is grounded in a simple conviction: that people's problems exist in the present, and that realistic growth requires an honest reckoning with who a person actually is, not who they wish they were, or who others need them to be.
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With individuals, Dr. Schwartz draws on psychoanalytic training to understand how the past shapes the present, while keeping his focus firmly on what is actionable now. With couples, he works to build common ground for communication, whether the goal is repair, new ways of being together, or a considered and respectful separation. In all cases, his aim is the same: that each person ends up with a clear and empathetic understanding of the other.
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That orientation, toward honesty, structure, and the conditions that make communication possible, is exactly why his perspective matters to us.
Dr. Schwartz is a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, where he teaches PSYC E-2000, Case Studies in the Lives of Persons, a graduate seminar that applies the Descriptive Psychology framework to clinical and human understanding. He also supervises trainee psychotherapists through Harvard and provides a supervision seminar for The Cambridge Health Alliance.
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His academic career has spanned William James College (formerly the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology), Wellesley College, the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. Dr. Schwartz sits on the Editorial Boards of The American Journal of Psychotherapy and Professional Psychology: Research and Practice.
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His research interests include empathy, the nature of human action and responsibility, sleep and dreaming, and the role of liberation, play, and improvisation in therapeutic change. He has published experimental studies on dreaming and problem representation, hypnosis and episodic memory, and engagement in psychotherapy. As a leading scholar in Descriptive Psychology, the behavioral framework developed by Peter Ossorio, Dr. Schwartz has built theory-free conceptualizations of action, responsibility, consciousness, and empathy that inform both clinical practice and the academic literature.
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Dr. Schwartz is Past President of the Society for Descriptive Psychology and an Associate of the Taos Institute.
Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept
Essential Attributes of Persons and Behavior.
In 2019, Academic Press (Elsevier) published Dr. Schwartz's book, Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept: Essential Attributes of Persons and Behavior. The book addresses the interdependent formal and substantive relationships between individual persons, intentional action, culture, language, and the world they inhabit. It was nominated for the 2020 American Psychological Association William James Book Award, one of psychology's most distinguished recognitions for scholarly contribution.
