Alongside my clinical work I’ve had a long career in academia, including nearly two decades 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 practice, though I continue to teach, part-time, on the clinical faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. I’m also on the interdisciplinary research faculty of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell.
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 East London to the “borderline” workplaces where so many of us spend one crazy-making day after another. I spoke with Leslie Jamison about gaslighting (and parenting) here.
The Gaslight Variations extends some of the themes of my first book, which was about paperwork, especially at its most maddening. Publishers Weekly called it “keen and vivacious.” The Times Literary Supplement called it “witty and rich.” The New York Review of Books called it “provocative, original, and a very good read.” And The New York Times found it “eccentric” — though it wasn’t too eccentric, apparently, 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.