Mary Davis

Mary Davis, MD is a child psychiatrist and child psychoanalyst working in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After training in adult, child, and adolescent psychiatry, she joined the faculty of the Medical College of Wisconsin, where she designed and ran an adolescent inpatient unit for five years, and a child psychiatric inpatient unit for three years. She completed her psychoanalytic training, for adults, adolescents, and children, in 1992. In 1995 she established a private practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Although Dr. Davis has been aware of the importance in being able to verbalize one's feelings since her years in training, in about 2007 she began working with training psychotherapists in China, and became more intrigued with the emotional resonances of one's "mother tongue," the ways in which the language one uses changes the communication as well as the ways in which language fails to facilitate communication. Her book, Language and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words Matter, is her first attempt to clarify some of the issues about language as it is used in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.