I was a professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication for nearly twenty years before leaving to focus on my clinical practice. I 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, double binds, mind games, 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.”
Although I’m no longer a full-time academic, I still 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 on the advisory boards of Parapraxis and History of the Present.
Three of my graduate students went on to academic careers (Berkeley, Harvard, New School), two became analysts.