Alongside my clinical practice I’ve had a long career in academia, including nearly twenty years in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. I spent a lot of that time thinking about how communication breaks down — in relationships, workplaces, the wider world. Some of that work is now going into a book for Random House, tentatively titled The Gaslight Variations, about how people drive each other crazy. Leslie Jamison wrote about the project for The New Yorker here. I’ve also written a book about paperwork, 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.”
In 2024 I left NYU to join the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where I teach clinical theory and technique. I’m involved in several other projects as well: I co-direct a working group at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell, where the focus is on history, policy, and the arts. I’m one of the co-founders of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, a clinical and cultural space in Downtown Brooklyn dedicated to making analysis more accessible. I’m on the guest faculty of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. I’m on the board of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Three of my NYU graduate students went on to academic careers, two became analysts. I offer consultations for academics and other professionals interested in entering the mental health professions.