Ben Kafka, PhD

Ben Kafka, PhD, LP, is an associate professor of clinical psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also on the interdisciplinary research faculty at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell. He provides psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to adults, young adults, and adolescents in private practice in Greenwich Village.

Before joining the clinical faculty at Columbia, Dr. Kafka spent nearly twenty years as a professor of the history and theory of communication at NYU, with visiting appointments at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar. He has also been guest faculty at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Over the years he has lectured and published widely on the interpersonal and impersonal systems that leave us feeling anxious and alienated. He is currently working on a new book for Random House, The Gaslight Variations, about how people drive each other crazy.

Dr. Kafka received his BA from Brown, his PhD in intellectual and cultural history from Stanford, and his clinical training from the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), with additional training through the Melanie Klein Trust. He serves on the boards of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the New York Institute for the Humanities.