Alongside my clinical practice I’ve had a long career in academia, including nearly twenty years at NYU. I’ve spent a lot of this time thinking about breakdowns in communication — the causes, the consequences — in therapy and in personal relationships, in the workplace and out in the world. I’m currently working on a book for Random House, tentatively titled The Gaslight Variations, about how people drive each other crazy (gaslighting, mind games, double binds, passive aggression, etc. — there’s a conversation about the new project here). I’m also the author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books), a historical and psychological investigation into our encounters with bureaucracy, especially when things go wrong. The New York Review of Books called it “a bright and sparkling study … provocative, original, and a very good read.” The New York Times called it “eccentric.”
I lead an active institutional life: I’m an associate professor of clinical psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia. I’m a visiting fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. I serve on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities. I’m also a member of the advisory board at Parapraxis.
Three of my graduate students at NYU went on to academic careers, two became analysts.