My Psychoanalytic History

I was the first person on either side of my family to go to college and was fortunate to attend the University of Michigan (Psychology Honors Program).  At the time, the Psychology program was very psychoanalytic.  It was also deeply infused with a kind of Midwestern pragmatism and a commitment to empirical research.  I encountered such interesting psychoanalytic thinkers there: Drew Westen, Irene Fast, Marty Mayman, George Rosenwald, Howard Shevrin, and others influenced me greatly. Even the social psychologists were psychoanalytically inclined: my thesis mentor, Martin Gold, enthusiastically supported my psychoanalytic honors thesis, which one two departmental prizes. Knowing that the Michigan clinical psychology program did not accept their own undergraduates for fear of academic inbreeding, I sought graduate training in New York City on the advice of my mentors.  In the summer of 1993, I moved to Manhattan with two suitcases and no money.  I studied psychology and psychoanalysis at the New School for Social Research, which was full of intriguing psychanalytic thinkers. I took classes with Bernie Weitzman (Buddhist Jungian), Teresa Brennan (Freudian feminist), and Michael Adams (Jungian analyst).  Professor Adams offered an elective in Psychoanalytic Studies that presented fascinating guest lecturers (Mikkel Borch Jacobson, Peter Swales, Sonu Shamdasani, and Jeremy Safran among others).  In addition to starting graduate school, one of the first things I did in New York was to seek out low-cost psychoanalysis through Columbia University.  I entered analysis with Yoram Yovell.  Over four gloriously revelatory and transformative years, I spent four days per week on the couch thinking and feeling about my life experience. This process fortified and sophisticated me in the ways that I needed in order to thrive in Manhattan.  In retrospect, I think that it was one of my best clinical training experiences.  I learned how to think deeply and openly about myself and others.  While in New York, I spent lots of time attending lectures on psychoanalysis at the City’s various institutes.  I was fascinated by the psychoanalytic theories I encountered but noticed differences from the Midwestern, pragmatic, empirical psychoanalysis I first encountered at Michigan.  Committed to a career in academic psychology, I decided to learn multivariate statistics to model the multi-determined human complexity I was learning about in psychoanalysis.  I pursued my doctoral degree in clinical psychology at Fordham University, which was sufficiently psychoanalytic (Berman, Bernstein, Bornstein, Cecero, and Wertz were clinical faculty members) and psychometric.  I trained at the Fordham University Counseling Center and at Bellevue, which were both very psychoanalytic, and conducted a dissertation on psychological mindedness, attachment, and personality.  Afterward, I completed a postdoc at Yale and then joined the medical school faculty. Early on, I spent about five years in a 20-person, interdisciplinary faculty seminar led by Mort Reiser (former Chair of the Psychiatry Department) and Elise Snyder, both noted analysts.  It was a terrific way to connect psychoanalysis to other parts of the university.

For the past 20+ years at Yale, I have taught courses, trained clinicians and researchers, and helped to start two successful research programs, one on chronic pain and opioid dependence and the other on Native American mental health – infusing psychoanalytic constructs into each program.  I am a psychotherapy researcher who uses qualitative and quantitative methods.  In private practice, my work has been psychoanalytically oriented and longer term.  I now focus exclusively on psychoanalysis, having trained in Adult Psychoanalysis at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University.  I am extremely interested in the history and future of psychoanalysis as a progressive discipline, as articulated so clearly by Aron & Starr (2018).