Neil Feinberg





Neil I. Feinberg

Neil I. Feinberg, LCSW, is an Attachment Therapist and lecturer who had been in private practice in Evergreen, Colorado. He had also worked in conjunction with Attachment Therapist Deborah Hage in a business called Turning Point, and had links to practices in Arizona and Massachusetts.

Feinberg trained with Jacqui Schiff and associated himself early on with Foster Cline, founder of the Youth Behavior Program located in Evergreen, Colorado (later renamed the Attachment Center at Evergreen [ACE], and now doing business as the Institute for Attachment and Child Development). Feinberg reportedly worked at ACE from approximately 1983 to 2002.

In 1993, Feinberg and ACE made a videotape, Attachment and Bonding Therapy, that demonstrates techniques used during the “Two-Week Intensive,” an intervention developed at ACE. In this video, a child is subjected to Holding Therapy (and a similar technique called “Emotional Shuttling”), reparenting, psychodrama, and more. As late as 2004, Feinberg had shown a part of this video during a presentation at an ATTACh conference, when he spoke approvingly of Emotional Shuttling.

Feinberg describes Connell Watkins as his mentor. Feinberg worked at ACE while Watkins was clinical director there. When Watkins left ACE, she set up her own Attachment Therapy practice — Connell Watkins & Associates — and named Feinberg as one of her associates on her letterhead. Watkins also disclosed to patients that she was practicing under his social-work license, though Feinberg has testified that he was unaware of that disclosure when it was being made to patients. Watkins was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison for killing 10-year-old Candace Newmaker during in the second week of a Two-Week Intensive. Videotapes of that child’s maltreatment, shown at Watkins’s trial, revealed techniques similar to those shown in the Feinberg/ACE 1993 videotape.

Official records indicate that Feinberg’s LCSW license in Colorado has been subjected to discipline five times. He stipulated to three probations: the first, for one year, ending in 1985, and a second, beginning in 2000. He also received a letter of admonition in 1990. He was currently on a third probation, for three years, to which he had stipulated in 2004, when he was charged for a fifth time and the probation was rescinded.

The last disciplinary action stemmed from three complaints, one of which alleged Feinberg had used a “licking technique” while he “rested on his elbows atop” an 8-year-old client. The child was at the time “pinned on his back underneath” Feinberg while Feinberg licked the child from neck to forehead.

In September 2009, three months before he was to face a disciplinary hearing on the latest charges, Feinberg agreed to surrender his social-work license and cease practice permanently.

In His Own Words

— Most Telling —

— Taunting Children —

— Holding Therapy —

— Attachment Therapy for Babies —

— Using the Discarded Notion of Catharsis —

— Bullying Children —

— Threatening Abandonment —

— “Killing Feelings” —

[Said to child restrained in Feinberg’s lap:]

— More Attachment Therapy —

— Sustained Eye Contact —

— Scaring Parents About “Attachment Disorder” —

— Intimidation by Breaking Verbal Taboos —

— Kids Don’t Feel Pain? —

— Body Memories —

— The Rageful Newborn,
the Telepathic Fetus,
the Affectionate Zygote —

— Demonizing Birth Parents —

— Guesswork in Therapy —

— Obedience Training & Therapeutic Parents —

— Attachment Parenting —

— Strong Sitting —

— School —

— Crossing More Boundaries —

— Success —

— Endorsing Others —

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