Alison Feit,
PhD

Background

I trained at Harvard under Drew Westen, who taught me that character is not a trait but a system — an architecture — and that if you want to understand what drives someone's behavior, you cannot ask them, because they do not know. You have to learn to read the system underneath. I trained at Yale under Mahzarin Banaji, whose work on implicit cognition proved empirically what clinicians had observed for a century: that the most powerful forces organizing human behavior are almost entirely invisible to the person experiencing them.

I studied at the William Alanson White Institute in New York — one of the great training grounds of American psychoanalysis, home to the Interpersonal tradition founded by Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. It was there that I had the enormous good fortune to be mentored by Miltiades Zaphiropoulos, M.D. — who had been trained by Fromm himself, who had personally known the founders of the tradition, and who carried in his practice a living continuity with the origins of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. He was born in 1914 and died at 101. He used to say, with a patience that bordered on mischief, "The thing you can't see is always the thing that's running the show." It took me fifteen years to understand what he meant. Now I teach it.

I was awarded the Goethals Prize at Harvard — given to one person a year for teaching excellence. To me it meant something very specific: that I could help people think differently, not merely know more. That distinction has governed everything I have done since.

I am a practicing psychoanalyst. That is not a credential I invoke and set aside — it is my medium. Whether I am sitting with a patient in my consulting room in New York, advising a university president on the psychology of institutional transition, reading the personality dynamics on a trading floor, helping physicians in a war zone recover the capacity to function, or sitting across from former KGB agents in Siberia building a school system from the ruins of the Soviet state — the discipline is the same. Psychoanalysis is how I see. It is what I teach. And it is, I believe, the most powerful and most underutilized framework for understanding human beings that the modern world has produced.

I teach at the William Alanson White Institute. I train psychoanalysts through CAPA — the program that has brought psychoanalytic training to China — and have taught and supervised clinicians from New York to Beijing, from Addis Ababa to Kyiv to Siberia to Istanbul. I have taught at the Stony Brook University School of Business. I serve as ambassador to Gondar, Ethiopia. Wherever the hunger for this depth of understanding exists and the institutions to support it are being built, that is where I want to be.

I came to this work because I kept watching brilliant, dedicated people fail at their most important relationships — and I could not stop wanting to understand the structure of why. I have spent twenty-five years on that question, and the answer has taken me from consulting rooms to trading floors to medical schools in countries that were falling apart to the living rooms of families navigating wealth and power and the particular loneliness that comes with both. The through line is not a specialty. It is a conviction: that people are legible, that the forces driving them are specific and patterned and readable, and that making this visible — to the people who need it, in the rooms where it matters — is work worth doing.