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, families, 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 a bit about the project in an essay 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 “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 join the clinical faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, where I teach theory and technique to early career analysts. I’m also a fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell, where the focus is on history, policy, and the arts. Over the years I’ve held visiting positions at a number of other institutions, including Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. I serve on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities.