Aaina Lakha, LMSW
Postgraduate Social Worker

Aaina Lakha holds an MSW from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and provides therapy to individuals and couples. She is interested in exploring the way our ideas of who we are – and who others are – come to be shaped by our life histories. She believes that psychotherapy that explores the unique way each individual comes into these ideas can be transformative and life changing.

Aaina works psychoanalytically, with a curiosity toward those things we do not know and which nevertheless shape our experience of life profoundly. Through the unfolding of the clinical relationship and attention to the changing ways patient and therapist recognize and experience each other, she hopes to make room for meeting the thoughts, fantasies, desires, fears, and shames that we otherwise keep far away from our conscious experience.

As a social worker and therapist, Aaina works with an awareness of the social and environmental factors that shape our lives. She is interested in attending to the way dynamics of power, oppression, and exclusion can show up in the consulting room and considers these to represent important sites for work and transformation. Oppression can cause us to exclude parts of ourselves, or submerge and separate out parts of our being, while forcing us to conform or develop according to social expectation and circumstance. An anti-oppressive therapy offers a chance to challenge, question, mourn, and negotiate the way we are shaped by oppression and trauma.

Aaina's experience is largely with queer and trans people, people of color, artists, and organizers. She is a contributing editor to Parapraxis, a magazine interested in psychoanalysis, culture, and politics. She has a B.A. from Columbia University in Comparative Literature and Society.