Terry Marks-Tarlow: Embodied creativity & the courage to face uncertainty

Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD, has been a practicing clinician since 1985 and a practicing yogini since 1979. She specializes in deep transformation and issues surrounding creative production and believes that all effective psychotherapy is inherently creative. In this conversation, she and Serge Prengel discuss how the embodied creativity and meditative aspects of everyday life dovetail with the courage to face uncertainty and search for novelty in a fully relational clinical practice.


Terry Marks-Tarlow, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, California. She is Adjunct Faculty at Pacifica Graduate School, Teaching Faulty at the Insight Center, Los Angeles, and Visiting Professor at Italian Universita Niccolo Cusano, London. She presents workshops and seminars internationally and nationally on clinical intuition, creativity, play, and nonlinear dynamics. As an Executive Board Member of the Los Angeles County Psychological Association, she co-created and curates an annual exhibition of visual and performance arts, “Mirrors of the Mind: The Psychotherapist as Artist.” Dr. Marks-Tarlow has authored and co-edited numerous books, including Play & Creativity in Psychotherapy (2018, Norton), Truly Mindful Coloring (2016, PESI), Awakening Clinical Intuition (2014, Norton), Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy (2012, Norton), and Psyche’s Veil (2008, Routledge), all of which she illustrated herself. Dr. Marks-Tarlow embodies balance in life between play, imagination, and creativity through her dance, art, yoga, and writing opera librettos. See website.


Published March 2019.