Date: Fri 26-Apr-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

Alan-Naomi-Miller-therapists

Full Text:

w/photo: Newtown Couple Explores Worlds Of Mind And Spirit

B Y K AAREN V ALENTA

When Alan and Naomi Miller bought a house on Parmalee Hill Road in Newtown

last year, they felt much like they were returning to the England which they

left more than 30 years ago.

"So many town names in Connecticut, like Danbury and Kent, are those that we

knew in southern England - and the people here are so friendly," Dr Alan

Miller said.

The Millers, who have lived in New York City for the past three decades,

opened separate offices in their Newtown home last September for the practices

of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. While still maintaining their practices

in the city, they decided to begin to shift their lives to the countryside.

The move is more gradual than the one they made in 1961 when a young rabbi,

his wife and their infant and toddler sons arrived in New York City to take

charge of the Society for the Advancement of Judiasm, a snyagogue founded by

Mordecai M. Kaplan and devoted to the exposition of Reconstructionist Judiasm.

A son and brother of rabbis, Dr Miller had been a rabbi and Army chaplain in

England. He was educated at the University of London, where he earned degrees

in Herbrew and medieval Jewish literature and philosophy, and at Oxford

University, where he earned degrees in politics, philosophy and economics.

"My Jewish studies ended with the year 1600. At Oxford I wanted to know what

is going on in the modern world," he reminisced during a recent interview.

Considered a brilliant young rabbi, he was called from England to lead the

small, prestigious New York synagogue whose rabbi had moved to Jerusalem. Dr

Miller stayed for 31 years, retiring in 1992.

"We came to America when everything seemed to be falling apart," he said.

"There were assassinations, street marches. Four young men, civil rights

workers, were killed in Alabama. The father of one of them, Andrew Goodman,

came to speak at our synagogue. Andrew lived on West 86th Street, and went to

the same school as our children."

Within a few years of coming to the United States, Alan Miller began his

analytical training with the New York Freudian Society, a five-year program

preceded by his own analysis and followed by three years of supervised

training. This parallel career path evolved naturally, he said, because of the

counseling he was called upon to do as a rabbi and because of his intense

interest in literature.

"There's so much psychoanalytical theory in English literature and the Bible,"

he said. "Freud changed the way we look at literature. I was intrigued."

"To get my certification I had to go before a five-person board, just as I did

when I became a rabbi. Except when I became a rabbi, it was a board composed

of five males. When I became an analyst, the board was made up of five

females."

Changing Roles

The changing role of women in society was mirrored by Dr Miller's wife who

eventually would earn a doctorate in clinical social work and begin her own

practice.

"I grew up when expectations for women were different," Dr Naomi Miller said.

"Certainly in England it wasn't expected that women would go to college. I was

20 when I got married and had my first child at 21."

After moving to the United States she had two more children, a third son and a

daughter, and her weeks were filled with her role as mother and her duties as

the rabbi's wife.

"Still, I felt that something was missing so I enrolled at Hunter College and

took one course a semester," she said. "I just kept at it, although at the

time I didn't know where I was going with it.

"The incredible thing is that she could do it and at the same time have four

young children and be a rabbi's wife," her husband interjected. "She was a

rebbitzin - mother of the congregation. I think it was heroic that she finally

got a PhD.

"I did sometimes resent the fact that she had less time for me, but modern men

just have to get used to that fact of life," he said, smiling wryly.

Starting college after her youngest child was born, it took her eight years to

get a bachelor's degree at Hunter College. She went on for her master's, then

earned her Phd at the New York University School of Social Work. Besides

having a private practice in psychotherapy for adults, couples and children,

she is an adjunct assistant professor at the Hunter College School of Social

Work and is on the faculty of the New School for Social Research, where her

husband also teaches.

"I teach classes like abnormal psychology," she said. "He teaches the classics

- James Joyce, Dante."

He also is a clinical associate professor of theology in psychiatry at Cornell

University Medical College.

Both Millers are published authors. His book, God of Daniel S: In Search of

the American Jew, features a fictitious Jewish teacher at Queens College in

the 1960s who is searching for a Judaism appropriate to modern life. An

explanation of the Reconstructionist viewpoint, it was published in 1969 and

reprinted again eight years ago by University Press of America.

Naomi Miller's dissertation for her doctorate, entitled "Single Mothers By

Choice," became the foundation for her 1992 book, Single Parents By Choice: A

Growing Trend in Family Life, which was published by Insight Books/Plenum

Press.

Their private practices are independent.

Analysis And Therapy

Dr Alan Miller, who specializes in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically

oriented psychotherapy, explains that "Psychonalysis is all absorbing - it's

not a once-a-week thing. Psychotherapy is not as all-consuming."

Psychoanalysis helps people who keep experiencing and repeating the same

problems in their jobs, their relationships with the opposite sex, with their

children or in other facets of their life.

"It can help a patient see how he keeps shooting himself in the foot," Dr

Miller said. "Psychonalysis is the vehicle used to create a relationship

between the patient and the therapist."

Sometimes, Dr Miller admits, he used to be asked "how can a rabbi be a

psychoanalyst?"

"It is said social workers want to nurture, doctors want to cure, and

psychiatrists want to measure. I always tell my patients that I'm not here to

convert you to Judiasm," he responds.

Naomi Miller has always practiced general therapy, more recently moving into

areas such as anorexia and bulimia and other eating disorders.

"I do long-term issues-oriented therapy such as eating disorders and panic

disorders, and I am a sex therapist," Naomi Miller said. "I worked for a long

time in a child guidance clinic in New York, and I'm a consultant for the

Wesley Learning Center in Newtown."

Although it may have taken her longer to establish her career, she is doing

very well, her husband admits.

"It is generally accepted that women who come from Venus are doing much better

then men from Mars - women seem to have more jobs," he said, referring to the

current best-selling book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

The Millers wound up in Newtown almost by chance.

"Two colleagues of mine in New York - he's a neurologist, she's a psychiatrist

- found Newtown. We had never heard of it," Alan Miller said. "They were

planning to move here and said that if we also came, she'd refer patients to

us. They wound up moving to Vermont instead, and we wound up in Newtown with a

10-room house, plenty big enough for two offices and two waiting rooms."

Dr Allan Miller can be reached at 426-6058 in Newtown or (212) 873-8699 in New

York; Dr Naomi Miller can be reached at 426-6987 and (212) 496-9766.