Our story
30+ years championing the emotional and behavioral health of children in the Triangle Area of North Carolina.
Lucy Daniels Center is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization devoted to the healthy emotional development of young children. Established in 1989 with a grant from Raleigh writer and clinical psychologist Lucy Daniels, Ph.D. the Center began with an early intervention therapeutic preschool program serving 8 children in 1991. Throughout its 30 years of service, Lucy Daniels Center has expanded to become the largest nonprofit provider of mental health services for children in the Triangle with multifaceted mental health resources for children, their parents and teachers.
The principle which underlies all the Center’s programs is the belief that the contemporary psychoanalytic model of emotional life is a powerful tool for helping children become flexible, strong, and happy individuals. If parents, teachers, and children themselves understand the ways in which children’s biology, experience, and temperament influence the development of personality, behavior, and even cognitive function, many difficult school, family, and personal problems can be solved or avoided.
The Lucy Daniels Center Today
Today, our dedicated team continues the work that Lucy Daniels embarked upon in 1989. Here are a few things that make us unique!
- We see the world through the child’s eyes
- We consider the child’s experience in everything we do
- We understand how feelings impact a child’s school performance and participation in social relationships
- We support the whole family in enhancing their child’s growth and development
- We work as a team and collaborate regularly to ensure that each child is heard, valued, and empowered to be successful in school and in life
- All of our therapists hold Masters or Doctorate degrees in their field
- We offer 1:1 child/therapist ratio and 5:1 child/teacher ratio promoting dedicated, individualized attention for each child
- We are proud to now offer TELETHERAPY in the state of NC
Licenses and Certifications
- Lucy Daniels Center is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit, charitable organization legally incorporated and licensed with the State of North Carolina. Our Tax ID # is 58-1863104.
- Lucy Daniels Center is a licensed mental health facility by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
- Lucy Daniels School is licensed by the N.C. Department of Non-Public Education, NCES ID A 9702579.
- Lucy Daniels School is proud to be rated a 5-Star Preschool, the highest rated license standard administered by the North Carolina Division of Child Development, Department of Health and Human Services for our teachers’ levels of education and training, quality of our classroom environments, and our student-teacher ratios.
Meet Dr. Lucy Daniels
Dr. Lucy Daniels is a writer and clinical psychologist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1989, she founded the Lucy Daniels Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering emotional and creative freedom through education, outreach and psychoanalytic treatment and research, and the Lucy Daniels Center for Early Childhood, which uses psychoanalytic principles to promote the emotional development of young children and their parents.
Throughout her early life, Daniels struggled with the inability to fulfill the expectations of a wealthy and socially powerful family. She left high school at 16 and spent five years in psychiatric hospitals in treatment for severe anorexia nervosa. In 1956, less than a year after her release, a novel she had written in the hospital, Caleb, My Son, was published by Lippincott and became a bestseller. The story of a father-son conflict associated with the Brown decision to end segregation, Caleb, My Son appeared in several countries and won Daniels a Guggenheim Fellowship in literature.
By 1961 when her second novel, High on a Hill, was published, Dr. Daniels had married and given birth to two of her four children. Over the next several years, she found writing fiction more and more difficult, and felt ashamed of her lack of education. In 1968, she entered college and began studying psychology at the University of North Carolina. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa four years later, and then pursued clinical training in psychology, which led to a doctorate in 1977.
While her education enabled Dr. Daniels to help others, it was psychoanalysis that freed her from both chronic anorexia and a debilitating writer’s block. In her words, analysis “enabled me to make the journey from the desert of creative paralysis to creative freedom.”
Now a prolific writer, Dr. Daniels works both in her private practice and her foundation to help other creative individuals overcome emotional conflicts, often through an analysis of their dreams.
In 2002, Dr. Daniels published her memoir, With a Woman’s Voice: A Writer’s Struggle for Emotional Freedom. Dr. Daniels was named a Distinguished Friend of Psychoanalysis by The American Psychoanalytic Association in 1991 and an Honorary Colleague of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis in 1995.
Dr. Daniels has four children and eight grandchildren.