Dr. Rene Stephan Tillich, PhD

Media Releases

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. 

Recommended Articles

• Tips to Overcome Procrastination for Each Type of Procrastinator

  Ever wondered how to overcome procrastination? Well, you have landed on the right page. This article focuses on how to beat procrastination. Each of us procrastinates for different reasons, and we all do it sometimes at least at one stage of our lives. There are six styles of procrastinators...

• Have You Heard About the Various Types of Depression?

  Depression is a state of mind wherein people feel sad, anxious, and upset all the time. It is a mental condition that affects the way a person thinks, feels, and behaves. Depression happens when people's thoughts turn completely negative and they later become distant avoiding any form of social...

• This College Graduate with Autism Is an Inspiration

  For this young man, college was never a question. Many may think that's not that special, but in this case, it is. Paris King has autism, and many teens with autism might not have the same courage to go through with what he accomplished.Autism involves a social disability that may affect someone's...

• What Is Intrinsic Motivation?

  Intrinsic motivation is a type of behavior, which is driven or fueled by internal rewards. It involves engaging in a behavior, in which a person finds it as personally rewarding. Essentially, a person performs an activity not to receive external rewards, but for his or her own...

• What Specialists Can Conduct Cognitive Behavioral Therapies?

  When you are in a challenging situation that affects your behavior or thinking, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you achieve peace within yourself by breaking down your situation into five different parts:...

• How to Naturally Increase Libido

  If there is one thing that binds couples aside from love, that would be libido. Most of us do not give attention to it until it becomes very low and causes relationship problems. You might have low libido issues if you have the following symptoms:...