Saybrook Psychology PhD student Morrice Apprey interns at Region Ten Community Services Board in Charlottesburg, Virginia. He takes delight in supporting people’s well-being and building on the work done by his father, psychoanalyst and Saybrook alumnus Maurice Apprey.
Morrice is confident Saybrook is training him to connect directly with each client. “I’ll be able to take the skills that I’ve gained from the community, work experiences, and from the classroom and apply them in ways that meet people at their individual needs,” he says. “A lot of universities will use a cognitive behavioral therapy or just one specific mode of working with people. To come to an institution where I can, in a sense, be eclectic, but be knowledgeable in each one, is a joy. You can learn about each individual style and method of working with people and make it your own and not necessarily go to a university where you’re taught to only work with people in one way. It’s just been a blessing to be a part of the school.”
Presently, Morrice is the Student Assistance Program Manager at Region Ten’s Monticello High School in Virginia. “My experience at Region Ten has been phenomenal. It’s a beautiful opportunity to utilize the skills that I’ve already developed through my master’s education and at the same time, it’s allowed me to incorporate opportunities to learn new methods of things like assessments.”
Morrice aspires to use music and exercise therapy methods in his field of work. “My mom was a music therapist and my father is a psychoanalyst,” Morrice says, “As a kid, at seven or eight, I carried music equipment to see where my mom was going to work and actually sat in on sessions, not knowing that they were therapeutic.”
Doing that, he said, helped him pick up those kinds of things without really knowing that he was learning a therapeutic craft. “Sitting and watching that and then sitting in a class for intervention – I can learn how to merge those things together. What I’m trying to do with the research now is take exercise and make that my own as well. That’s the fun side of it for me.”
Morrice’s father, Dr. Maurice Apprey, a Saybrook Alumnus, is tenured at the University of Virginia and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society in Washington, DC. Among other notable recognitions, he was a student of Anna Freud and Amedeo Giorgi.
“My father is one of those people that has done so much. It’s amazing and inspiring”, Morrice remarks. “He does so much, but he doesn’t tell people about it,” he laughs. “It was only maybe about a month ago I was reading through something I found on him – that a student university paper where he works had done an interview – and I learned more about him from that interview than from some things he told me.”
When asked his future goals, Morrice replies, “It’s just to change people’s lives and I know that can sound corny or cliché. It’s to be able to take psychology and use exercise, music – all the different things that I’ve been passionate about and use it to improve the quality of people’s work and change the outlook towards the challenges that they face. Down the road, I’d like to do some public work; working for an agency. Whether it’s a veteran’s hospital or whether it’s a community agency like Region Ten where I am now.”