Alongside my practice I’ve had a long career in academia, including nearly twenty years as a professor of 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 focus on my patients, though I continue to teach, now part-time, at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. I’m also a fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell, where the emphasis is on history, policy, and the arts.
In both my clinical and academic work, I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about what Freud called “anxiety situations” — in ourselves, relationships, families, groups, organizations, the wider world. Some of that work is now going into a book for Random House, The Gaslight Variations, about how people drive each other crazy. This includes our experiences in what I’ve come to think of as borderline workplaces, where turbulent interpersonal and impersonal systems converge. I spoke to Leslie Jamison about parts of the project here.
The new book extends some of the themes of my first book, which was about paperwork, especially at its most maddening. Publishers Weekly called it “a keen, vivacious examination of the frustrating ‘unpredictability’ of paperwork.” 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” — though not too eccentric, it seems, for the Supreme Court.
Upcoming events include a lecture on passive aggression at Bard and another on the analyst’s notebooks at Princeton. Recent talks 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 Princeton’s Seminar in Psychoanalytic Studies; and a roundtable, “Discontent and its Civilizations,” for the American Psychoanalytic Association.
I serve on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities.