My work with leaders is grounded in the study of psychology that began when I was a teenager and undergrad. I pivoted into the excitement of the business sector for a while, led a tech company and did management consulting, and was mesmerized by the thrilling, punishing pace and the incredible highs of winning.

But I realized that the deals, the sales, and the software development didn’t move me as much as the people who were doing the work, and the sometimes brutally painful personal obstacles they were facing in the arena. I returned to psychology and psychoanalysis over 25 years ago, and I’ve been doing therapy and analysis with business leaders ever since.

I got my doctorate at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, did advanced training in CBT, EMDR, IFS and other acronyms, and joined the faculty to teach and supervise the clinical work and research of doctoral candidates. I’ve published in The Jung Journal and The Journal of Analytical Psychology, and am working on a book that argues that Freud had Oedipus all wrong, and that Oedipus had a core trauma of abandonment. (So did Freud.)

Most importantly, I’ve had decades of my own psychoanalysis and therapy. 

My post-graduate studies continue at The College of Hard Knocks, where I worked over the years as a theater actor and director, journalist, high school teacher, highway flagman, short-order cook, nurse’s aide, house painter and cab driver. Still nuts about the theater, I get to Manhattan when I can, but I retreat to the bucolic theater town of Ashland, Oregon where I live on the edge of a forest, with my wife, the writer Lesley Quinn.