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Research and publications



Hilma af Klint, The Swan, No. 17 (1915)

My research explores the cultural and political dimensions of subjectivity, including the social conditions of psychic freedom and well-being. I’m interested in the ways in which collective group affiliation—be it political, racial, religious, or other—shape our intimate and personal experiences, from family and romantic relationships, to sexuality, to self-understanding and creative pursuits. At the same time, my work pushes against the tendency to reduce psychological experience to social and political factors. I believe psychoanalysis should be culturally informed yet approach each patient as a unique person whose experience always transcends and complicates their external circumstances and social identities.

As a psychoanalyst, I am concerned with using my scholarly insight to help my patients in their path towards greater self-understanding and agency. In one recent publication, I draw on my clinical experience and my study of Lacan’s developmental theory to illustrate how racial difference between analyst and patient can advance the therapeutic work (“Not Exactly White: Race as Potential Space,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 59). In another, I explore my patients’ experience of religious and spiritual belief in order to challenge Freud’s dismissal of such beliefs as pathological “defenses” (”Faithful Suspicion: Ricœur between Freud and Hegel,” forthcoming).

My work in psychoanalysis is informed by two decades of philosophical studies. Focusing on 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, I’ve studied connections between fundamental feelings such as shame, anxiety, and sexual desire, both in Rousseau and in Hegel (“Sex and the City: Rousseau on Sexual Freedom and Its Modern Discontents,” Inquiry 68:2; “Alleviating Love’s Rage: Hegel on Shame and Sexual Recognition,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28:4). Another essay, drawing on Hegel and Arendt, traces the relationship between fear of death and political engagement (“Finite Freedom: Hegel on the Existential Function of the State,” European Journal of Philosophy 30:3).

Earlier in life I worked as a journalist and editor and published magazine essays in both English and Hebrew (in The Point and Ha’aretz, among other outlets). While in recent years I have come to focus on my commitments as a therapist, my past experience in creative observation and writing informs and enriches my work with patients.