Polly Young-Eisendrath

With her late husband, Ed Epstein, she created Dialogue Therapy for Couples, a time-limited couples therapy done by one or two therapists, designed to help couples to handle their conflicts respectfully through the use of a combination of psychoanalysis, mindfulness and psychodrama. Epstein died of Alzheimer's disease in 2014 and Young-Eisendrath's memoir of the experience narrates the process of the disease from the lens of a practicing Buddhist, offering insight into methods of coping with loss, death and grief.

She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, TED-X, 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.

Young-Eisendrath began Zen training in 1970 at the Rochester Zen Center with Philip Kapleau. She became a student of Shinzen Young in 1998. She is currently a Mindfulness and Dharma teacher in the tradition of Shinzen Young, and practices both Soto Zen and Vipassanā, and has also practiced Phowa with Ayang Rinpoche and Anyen Rinpoche. She directs Waysmeet Sangha, a friendship-based Buddhist sangha, which she hosts in Vermont.

Young-Eisendrath attended Ohio University (OU) from 1965–1970 and graduated with a major in English literature. While at OU, she was an Ohio Fellow and a student in the Honors College. She earned a Masters of Arts from Goddard College, a Masters of Social Work in Clinical Social Work and a Ph.D. in Developmental and Counseling Psychology from Washington University. She is also a diplomate Jungian analyst and completed her training through the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. She has maintained an independent clinical practice as a psychologist since 1982: in Pennsylvania from 1982 to 1994 and in Vermont since 1992. She has been a clinical associate professor in Psychiatry at the University of Vermont Medical College since 1994 and is a clinical supervisor at the Norwich University Counseling Service.

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.