Shan Guisinger, Ph.D.

Breaking news: Workshop in Missoula, Montana, September 24, 2010. Click here for information.

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I received my doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley in Clinical Psychology. I completed my pre-doctoral internship at Martinez VA Medical Center and its satellite Oakland Outpatient clinic and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University in 1988-89 in the Eating Disorders Clinic and the Department of Psychiatry.

I have a long-standing interest in integrating evolutionary biology with psychology. I originally completed graduate work in behavioral ecology at Colorado State University, and I taught college biology for several years before getting my degree in psychology.

In my research and publications I seek to understand the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors that together create difficulties — and sometimes provide remedies — for emotional problems. My focus has been on the eating disorders and interpersonal relatedness. Some of these articles are posted on this site.

I have extensive clinical experience working with clients struggling with eating disorders and with couples who are working with communication and intimacy. I also enjoy working with dreams in psychotherapy.

I believe that knowledge of human biology and especially specific evolutionary adaptations can be utilized to help people understand many psychological problems, and this has guided my therapeutic approach to working with anorexia nervosa. For example, the adapted-to-flee-famine hypothesis proposes that anorexic’s abilities to ignore hunger and mobilize energy may once have allowed starving hunter-gatherers to travel in search of food. If this is true–and the evidence is strong—it means that neither the anorexic or her family is to blame for the symptoms.

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