Dr. Rene Stephan Tillich, PhD

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Get to know Psychologist Dr. Rene Stephan Tillich, who serves patients in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Dr. Tillich has been a practicing psychologist in Hawaii since 1968. He is currently serving patients at King Kalakaua Center for Humanistic Psychotherapy in Honolulu. He, along with his late wife, Dr. Linda Meyerson Tillich, co-founded King Kalakaua Center for Humanistic Psychotherapy in 1971. The Center is an association of diverse therapists with a humanistic orientation and a commitment to innovative approaches to therapy. Though each therapist is a private practitioner, these individually trained and carefully selected clinicians share common core values as they relate to therapy and the founding values of the King Kalakaua Center.

Dr. Tillich specializes in group therapy, individual therapy, and couples therapy. His orientation is to be fully present; to help patients access their feelings (humanistic orientation); to explore with patients how their lives, past and present, shape the feelings they experience (psychodynamic orientation); and to encourage patients to choose their meaning in as full and creative ways as possible (existential orientation).

Dr. Tillich believes that the specific problems patients bring to therapy are the vehicles the therapist and the patient use to carry them to deeper, fuller awareness and understanding. The anxiety and depression, which underlies the specific problems, can be experienced as the waterways with which those vehicles sail to awareness. Dr. Tillich attributes his success to curiosity of how people think and react. 

Dr. Tillich is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Hawaii Psychological Association, the Hawaii Association for Humanistic Psychology, and the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Dr. Tillich earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College in 1960 and his Doctor of Psychology degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. 

Psychology is the science of behavior and mind. It includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as feeling and thought. Through counseling and experimentation, psychologists, like Dr. Tillich, work to promote safety, understanding, and good mental health. They work in research, teaching, and clinical practice to help patients understand themselves and cope with day-to-day issues, mental illness, abuse, addiction, and loss. 

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