I'm a Jungian psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher. What animates my work is the deep stories running beneath the surface of things. Getting there means rooting around in the rubble of history, getting messy in the dustbin of mythology, cultivating the lift-off of creative imagination, and listening to dreams — which weave all of this together.

There may or may not be a 'deep state,' but there are surely deep stories. They allow us to share what is emotionally essential — within ourselves and with each other. And there we touch down on common ground.

About

Professional Foundation

I'm a founding member and the first President of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, where I serve on faculty. I've been teaching and supervising prospective Jungian analysts for over forty years. I hold a B.A. from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in neuropsychology from the City University of New York, and I completed my training as a Jungian analyst in 1985 after research in psychosomatic medicine at Rockefeller University. My writing has appeared in numerous journals, books, and the popular press — including contributions to The Cambridge Companion to Jung and The Book of Symbols (Taschen, 2010). I've spoken at conferences and gatherings across the United States, Europe, Russia, Africa, Australia, Central America and Latin America — including a keynote about African oracles and modern psychoanalysis at the International Association for Analytical Psychology Congress in Cape Town. Closer to home, I’ve appeared with artist Pat Steir and musician David Byrne in conversations at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

Scheherazade has been a patron saint of my work. In One Thousand and One Nights, she tells stories that literally save lives — spinning them out night after night, keeping the Sultan's curiosity alive and, eventually, relieving his murderous rage. I think of psychoanalysis, and of serious imaginative writing, as heirs to her talking cure. Great stories and the symbols through which they move touch us in ways that reason alone does not. They bridge our inner life to the lives we share with others.

In a world where the line between fact and fiction is dissolving in the information stream, cultivating our imaginations and the symbols that move us is not a luxury. It is how we tell the genuinely human from the simulacrum, and how we foster something like an ethical, empathic life — individually and together.

Current Projects

Right now I’m working on a memoir “$13.82” about my mother’s escape from Warsaw in 1939, a ghostly disappearing letter, and her uncanny death in New York City many years later. I’m also working on a book, The Public Life of Symbols that explores how our relationship to archetypal symbols shape public life —both creatively and destructively.

I live and work in the Hudson Valley of New York.

Published Work

Find more of my work in books and journals.