Lucy Holmes is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, as well as being an accomplished writer, lecturer, and teacher of the subject. 

Her first book, The Internal Triangle: New Theories of Female Development (2007), presented a completely new hypothesis about the psychology of women, following development through the major milestones of the female life cycle.

Her second book, Wrestling with Destiny: The Promise of Psychoanalysis (2013), considers the various ways that destiny is linked to the repetition compulsion and uses the latest findings in neuroscience to explain how the evolved talking that occurs in psychoanalysis can literally change the mind.

Dr. Holmes' third book, Women and Psychoanalysis (2020), is a collection of her papers that charts her professional growth from student to seasoned clinician in order to provide a guidebook for how psychoanalytic theory is conceptualized, created and tested in the analytic session. Specifically, the book traces the development of thinking on the place of women in psychoanalysis and how psychoanalysis has changed how it views and treats women.

Her articles have appeared in The International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Group, and Modern Psychoanalysis. One of her articles, "The Object Within: Childbirth as a Developmental Milestone," won the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis's Gradiva award as the best article of 2002. 

Dr. Holmes also works as a faculty member and training analyst at a number of institutes: 

• The Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies
• The New York Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
• The Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
• The Center for Group Studies

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A former President of the Maternity Center Association and the Society of Modern Psychoanalysts, Dr. Holmes served as Executive Director of the Center for Group Studies from 1998 to 2003.

A popular lecturer, Dr. Holmes has presented her ideas about women, group psychotherapy, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and new neuroscience at conferences and workshops all over the country. She was the first speaker at the Louis R. Ormont Chair Lecture at the American Group Psychotherapy Association's annual conference in 2008.