Alongside my clinical work I’ve had a long career in academia, including nearly two decades teaching the history and theory of communication at NYU, with stops along the way at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar. I left NYU during the pandemic to concentrate on my practice, though I continue to teach, part-time, on the clinical faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. I’m also a member of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell, where the focus is on the history, politics, and culture of mental health.
I continue to write part-time, too. I’m currently working on a book for Random House, The Gaslight Variations, about how people drive each other crazy — from our most personal relationships to our most impersonal ones. I’m helped along the way by an idiosyncratic group of mid-century mind scientists whose own investigations took them from the nursery schools of Iowa City to the living rooms of London to the bedrooms of Paris to the “borderline” workplaces where so many of us spend one crazy-making day after another. I spoke to Leslie Jamison about gaslighting (and parenting) here.
Over the years I’ve published and lectured widely. My first book was about paperwork, especially at its most maddening. Publishers Weekly called it “keen and vivacious,” The New York Review of Books called it “bright and sparkling,” and The New York Times called it “eccentric.” Recent public events include a conversation with Adam Phillips and Jamieson Webster at the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis; an exchange with Cassie Kaufmann, founder of the Greene Clinic, at Princeton’s Seminar in Psychoanalytic Studies; a panel on remote treatment during the pandemic at the Austen Riggs Center; and a roundtable, “Discontent and its Civilizations,” for the American Psychoanalytic Association.
I’ll be returning to Riggs in the spring to deliver a lecture, “Passive Aggression: History, Theory, and Practice.”
I serve on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities.