About - Malka Ceh, PhD, MSc, cNPA

About

Who I am, what I do, and why I do it

Your emotions have their own agenda

You take better care of yourself now. You eat with attention, move your body, make plans, set reminders, and often follow through. You invest in your growth. You try to understand yourself, improve your relationships, make better decisions, and build a life that works for you.

And still, your emotions sometimes seem to have plans of their own. You react more strongly than you intended. You replay conversations long after they are over. Criticism gets under your skin. Frustration derails your judgment. You know perfectly well that worrying will not solve tomorrow’s problem, yet your mind keeps returning to it.

What is that? It is your emotional system doing what it was shaped to do, which is not necessarily what you need it to do now.

Emotions are biological systems that organize attention, interpretation, motivation, and behavior. They were shaped by evolution to solve recurrent problems of survival and reproduction, not to make you happy, calm, productive, fulfilled, or consistently aligned with your values. Nature does not ask what matters to you. Fortunately, you can.

Learning how your emotional system works gives you considerably more influence over what happens next.

Hi, I’m Malka; I’m pleased to meet you

I work at the intersection of science and subjective meaning. I am a certified (neuro)psychoanalyst with a PhD in evolutionary anthropology and an MSc in psychotherapy science. I rely on the biological realities of the human mind and use evidence-based frameworks to help you understand and refine your emotional functioning.

Your Heading

What brought you here?

You may already function well and simply refuse to settle for a functional baseline. Perhaps you are intellectually curious about yourself and want to become more emotionally skilled. You may be highly accomplished professionally or academically, yet find that your emotional responses sometimes interfere with judgment, relationships, performance, or well-being. You may be an athlete trying to remain psychologically steady under pressure, recover faster from mistakes, or prevent frustration and fear from taking over when performance matters most.

Or perhaps there is no dramatic problem at all. You simply recognize that the quality of your emotional functioning affects virtually everything else you do, and you would like to improve it.

How we can work together

In my practice, we use evolutionary, affective, psychoanalytic, and existential frameworks to understand your emotional system and gradually improve the way it functions in everyday life. We may work on emotional regulation, reactivity, resilience, rumination, frustration tolerance, defensiveness, emotional awareness, expression, avoidance, or recurring relational patterns. We examine what your emotional responses are trying to accomplish, why particular patterns became established, and whether they remain useful in the life you are living now.

The aim is not emotional suppression or permanent calm. Emotions carry information, organize priorities, and make action possible. The work is to develop enough understanding, flexibility, and skill that your emotions become increasingly useful instruments rather than unquestioned instructions.

My practice is an inclusive space

I am an LGBTQ+ allying, kink-aware, sex-positive, childfree-affirming, weight-inclusive, and neurodivergent-informed psychoanalyst. Whoever you are, and however you navigate the world, you are warmly welcome.

You like to read the fine print?

I appreciate that. Here’s the story behind how I got here. My background, my training, and the experiences that have shaped my approach.

My academic and clinical training

My preoccupation with human emotions first emerged while I was studying language and literature. In my undergraduate thesis, I explored conceptual metaphors of emotion in everyday language, and in my postgraduate thesis in marketing, I examined how human emotions influence purchase decisions. By then, I found myself increasingly curious, which led me to pivot toward psychological disciplines. I pursued another BSc and an MSc in psychotherapy science and entered psychoanalytical training. As my understanding of the biological foundations of the mental world expanded, I augmented my background with a PhD in evolutionary anthropology, later leading to a postdoc in human ethology. I am currently advancing my clinical training through the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society's program.

What my background means for our work

Rooted in a psychoanalytic orientation, I am trained in depth approaches that integrate unconscious processes, developmental dynamics, and relational theories. I don’t believe in shortcuts or instant solutions, and instead swear by the patient, deliberate work of structural change. My grounding in biology reassures me that nothing organic transforms overnight; shaping new mental patterns takes time, care, and repetition. Practicing in different therapeutic frameworks, especially psychoanalysis and existential inquiry, has provided me with a diverse set of tools for this mission. They allow me to tailor my approach to your uniqueness, always anchored in evidence-based practice.

Because knowledge alone is not enough

Of course, theoretical knowledge alone does not cultivate skill; experience does. Over the years, I honed mine through diverse clinical and research adventures, collaborating on national and international projects on mental health and well-being. In my private practice, I have had the privilege of sharing my time with a colorful spectrum of minds, from high-performing professionals to individuals seeking to rebuild their lives after profound challenges.

Why I chose to focus on ex-believer mental health

Emotions have been a recurring thread throughout my academic and clinical life, long before I decided to make them the center of my work. I first studied how we conceptualize them in language, then how they shape economic decisions, and eventually how they emerge from the biological systems that organize human motivation, relationships, and behavior.

Over time, I became increasingly interested in a simple problem: emotional systems are extraordinarily sophisticated, yet they were not designed around the lives we are trying to live today. A response that once protected us can become unnecessarily costly. Fear can persist after danger has passed. Anger can recruit us into battles we would rather decline. Shame can regulate social behavior long after its original assumptions have become irrelevant. Attachment can override judgment. Rumination can keep an unresolved problem mentally alive without bringing us any closer to solving it.

My work has gradually narrowed around understanding these systems well enough to help people work with them more deliberately. Emotional health, to me, is not the absence of difficult feelings. It is the capacity to experience, understand, regulate, recover from, and use emotions in ways that support rather than repeatedly obstruct the life you want to live.

How understanding human nature matters

My approach is deeply rooted in evolutionary theory and affective science. Drawing from evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychiatry, cognitive and social neuroscience, and relational neurobiology, I use these disciplines to build a clearer biological map of emotion, motivation, and behavior. They illuminate not only why you feel the way you do, but also how to work with those feelings so that they become increasingly aligned with your goals and aspirations.

Understanding where an emotional response comes from does not automatically change it. But it gives us a better starting point. Instead of treating emotions as mysterious forces, defects to eliminate, or truths that must be obeyed, we can examine them as evolved processes with functions, histories, strengths, and limitations. From there, we can begin the slower and more interesting work of refinement.

Where would you like your emotions to take you?

I'm looking forward to learning more about how I can support your emotional growth.

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