Alongside my clinical work I’ve had a long career in academia, including nearly twenty years as a professor of the history and theory of communication at NYU. I spent a lot of that time thinking about how we deal with what Freud, back in the 1920s, called “anxiety situations” — in individuals, relationships, families, workplaces, institutions, 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. I spoke to Leslie Jamison about the project here. I’ve also written a book about paperwork, especially when things go wrong. The New York Review of Books called it “bright and sparkling … provocative, original, and a very good read.” The New York Times called it “eccentric.” More on that book here.
In 2024 I left NYU to focus on my private practice, though I still have a few academic affiliations. I’m on the clinical faculty of Columbia’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where I teach seminars on classical and contemporary theory and technique. I’m a fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell, where the emphasis is on history, policy, and the arts. I occasionally guest teach at the New York Psychoanalytic. I also serve on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Recent public events include a conversation with Adam Phillips and Jamieson Webster at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis; a panel on remote treatment during the pandemic at the Austen Riggs Center; an exchange with Cassie Kaufmann, Founder and Director of the Greene Clinic, at the Princeton Seminar in Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Studies; a roundtable, “Discontent and its Civilizations,” for the American Psychoanalytic Association; and another roundtable, “The Resurgence of Freud,” at the Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation.