As a historian, I wrote mainly about the past; as a clinician I write mainly about the present. Then and now I’m interested in what happens when our internal worlds collide with the external world. My first book, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012; French translation, 2013), was an investigation into our experiences of bureaucracy, especially when things go wrong. The book was well received in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, and elsewhere (“probably one of the most entertaining scholarly books ever written” –Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology). It even made it all the way to the Supreme Court. I’m currently at work on a book about the relationships, situations, and social forces that drive us crazy.
In addition to the book I’ve published several dozen articles, essays, and reviews, a few of which can be found here. I’m on the advisory board of Parapraxis. I’ve also had the pleasure of supervising a number of remarkable graduate students, three of whom went on to teach (Harvard, the New School, and UC Berkeley), two of whom went on to train as psychoanalysts.