Polly Young-Eisendrath

Polly Young-Eisendrath (born 1947) is an American psychologist, author, teacher, speaker, Jungian analyst, Zen Buddhist, and the founder of Dialogue Therapy and Real Dialogue and creator of the podcast Enemies: From War to Wisdom.

She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival,[1] TED-X,[2] and is the recipient of the Otto Weininger Award for Lifetime Achievement in Psychoanalysis. Young-Eisendrath is the originator of Dialogue Therapy, designed to help couples and others transform chronic conflict into greater closeness and development. In 1983, she and her late husband, Ed Epstein, designed Dialogue Therapy as a new form of couples therapy that combined psychoanalysis, Jungian theory, psychodrama, and gender theory. She has published two books on Dialogue Therapy (1984 and 1993), detailing its theory and methods for clinicians and the general public. She has now re-visioned and updated Dialogue Therapy to include the distinctive combination of psychodrama, Object Relations, and Mindfulness. In 2019 Shambhala Publications released Love Between Equals: Relationship as a Spiritual Path, a book that offers her vision of personal love as a spiritual path and draws on her experience of 30 years as a Dialogue Therapist and Jungian analyst. In September, 2021 Routledge released Dialogue Therapy for Couples and Real Dialogue for Opposing Sides: Methods Based on Psychoanalysis and Mindfulness. She maintains a clinical practice of Jungian analytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Vermont, United States.