Michael J Feldman, MD

Dr. Feldman is faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, in the Department of Psychiatry of Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is an educator, innovator, supervisor, and clinician specializing in Gender and Sexuality, Attachment Trauma, and Resilience. He is creator and course director of the Psychoanalytic Witnessing Elective for senior candidates, 2020 to the present, having started as Assistant then Associate Instructor of the Transgenerational Trauma and Resilience Course from 2002 to 2010. He created Columbia’s Child and Adolescent Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program and served as Founding Co-Director from 2003 to 2008.

Dr. Feldman received his BA in Classics from Wesleyan, a Certificate in Advanced German Studies from the Goethe Institute Berlin, and his MD degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He trained in Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry at Harvard-Longwood, where he was a Chief Resident, and attended classes in Psychiatry and Sexual Orientation and the Law at Harvard Law School.

He came to Columbia in 1994 for a clinical fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and followed it with a Research Fellowship in Sexuality and Adolescent Mental Health. He combined his psychiatric and psychoanalytic background as a participant on a historic panel at the American Psychoanalytic Association: the analyst’s sexuality and its impact on becoming a psychoanalyst over three generations. His exploration of the analyst’s subjectivity, and a multi-generational sensibility, deepened with work on trauma and witnessing in analyst and patient, inspired a panel at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and appears in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and PSYCHE – the German Journal of Psychoanalysis. His work on historical trauma in Psychoanalysis, analysts and patients is featured in reviews in the Huffington Post, psychoanalytic journals, and interviews in print and online media. It represents a decades-long effort to promote understanding and reconciliation among Shoah survivors and descendants of different groupings, including psychoanalysts.

Dr. Feldman actively consults with private and public schools about teen gender and sexual development and with diverse media outlets, film directors and artists in relation to personal and social trauma, including other therapists. He has a private practice working with adults and children in West Chelsea, Manhattan.