Biographical Profile |
I was born in the Midwest (Chicago), spent the first 30 years on the East Coast, and the last 55 years in Palo Alto/Stanford. My parents were Jewish—mother an immigrant fleeing Germany from Naziism in the 1930’s. My father was the son of a brilliant, scholarly rabbi. Dorothea Kaufmann Almond trained in Child Development at Columbia, leading to her role in developing the Child Care network at Stanford; Gabriel Almond got his PhD in Political Science at the University of Chicago, and after appointments on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Yale, and Princeton, became Chairman of the Department of Political Science at Stanford in 1965. I graduated from Harvard College cum laude in Biochemistry in 1959, with a senior thesis on “Mutagenesis by 2-aminopurine,” and from Yale Medical School in 1963. I trained in Psychiatry at Syracuse, Yale, and NIMH before joining the Psychiatry faculty at Stanford in 1969; in 1974 I went into private practice in Palo Alto, continuing in a clinical faculty role at Stanford. My early career was focused on social and community psychiatry, including a book, “The Healing Community; Dynamics of the Therapeutic Milieu,” which examined how people change in therapeutic community settings. I served as an administrator, consultant, and program developer for a number of psychiatry treatment programs. In mid-career I went into private practice and undertook psychoanalytic training in San Francisco, where I became a faculty member and training analyst. In the 2000’s I combined these two themes of my career interests by founding the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program along with local colleagues. I also co-authored with Barbara Almond “The Therapeutic Narrative: Fictional relationships and the Process of Psychological Change.” I plan to retire from seeing patients at the end of 2023 but will continue teaching and consultation. In 1962 I married a medical school classmate, Barbara Rosenthal, one of five women in our year. We had three children, David in 1964, and twins Michael and Steven in 1966. Barbara also became a psychiatrist, and later a psychoanalyst. We shared a love of music and performed lieder together. David became a skilled family physician, working in an Indian Health Service clinic; Michael works with web graphic design, specializing in making applications user-friendly; Steven is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and author of books in both realms, as well as a sought-after teacher of writing. Barbara died in 2016, four years after we celebrated our 50th Anniversary. In 2018 I was remarried to a life-long couple friend, Barbara Hauser, who resides in Brookline, Massachusetts. Living part-time in the Boston area has reconnected me with many friends and traditions from early life.
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