Paul E. Stepansky, Ph.D.

biography
curriculum vitae
recent & forthcoming activities
publications
papers online
generous offerings
a celebration
contact
home

Paul E. Stepansky, whose editorial skills have helped psychotherapists and psychoanalysts find their voices for the past quarter century and have had a shaping impact on debates within the field, received his A.B. in history (Summa cum laude, Phi beta kappa) from Princeton University in 1973. At Princeton, he was named a university scholar in history and psychoanalysis and, on graduation, received the Walter Phelps Hall Prize in European History. His graduate training was at Yale University, where he accepted a university fellowship for graduate study in European Intellectual History (under Peter Gay and Franklin Baumer) and subsequently became Yale's first Kanzer Foundation Fellow for Psychoanalytic Studies in the Humanities. While at Yale, Stepansky taught in both the history and psychology departments, studied history of psychiatry with David Musto, and, as the Kanzer Fellow, took courses at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. Yale awarded him the doctorate in history in 1978.

Stepansky's remarkable skill as a writer and editor was in evidence at an early age. While an undergraduate at Princeton, he was hired by Karl Rickels of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, to write papers under the auspices of Penn's Psychopharmacology Research Unit during summers and vacations. His own journal publications date back to this period. At Princeton, he was hired by the sociology department to aid Professor Donald Light in writing up material pursuant to Light's research into the socialization and professionalization of psychiatric residents (Donald Light, Becoming Psychiatrists: The Professional Transformation of Self [Norton, 1980]).

Since completing training in European intellectual history at Yale in the late 70s, Stepansky has given himself over to a career that revolves around psychoanalytic and psychiatric writing, editing, and publishing. Following a year as Senior Editor at International Universities Press, he developed a private editorial practice for analysts, psychiatrists, and therapists desirous of high-level editorial help with their books and papers. During the late 70s and 80s, his clientele included Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, John Gedo, Arnold Goldberg, James Grotstein, Arnold Richards, J. Gordon Maguire, Lloyd Silverman, and Paul Wachtel, among many others. Stepansky's collaboration with Heinz Kohut, which began in 1978, culminated in his key role in Kohut's controversial final book, How Does Analysis Cure?, which Stepansky prepared out of a dictated transcript left by Kohut at the time of his death in 1981. Several years later, he collaborated with Margaret Mahler on the preparation of her memoirs. Mahler withdrew from the project in 1984 because of the personal revelations it would entail, but she left a testamentary mandate authorizing Stepansky to take the project to completion after her death. Following Maher's death in 1985, Stepansky finished the project, and his version of Mahler's Memoirs, written in Mahler's own voice (and relying on many interview transcripts) was published by Free Press (Macmillan) in 1988.

Hired by psychology publisher Lawrence Erlbaum to manage The Analytic Press in 1983, Stepansky took a fledgling operation, initially a tiny division of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, and built it into the premier imprint for psychoanalytic books and journals in the country. During his 23-year tenure as Managing Director of The Analytic Press, he has had the opportunity to coach, edit, and publish leading theorists, clinicians, and developmental researchers from all walks of professional life. TAP authors for whom Stepansky served as personal editor and with whom he developed close working relationships include major theorists and writers of several generations, among them Lewis Aron, Sandra Buechler, M. Robert Gardner, John Gedo, Merton Gill, Arnold Goldberg, Sue Grand, Adrienne Harris, Irwin Hoffman, Melvin Lansky, Joseph Lichtenberg, Susan Miller, Stephen Mitchell, Jean Sanville, Herbert Schlesinger, Lloyd Silverman, Joyce Slochower, Donnel Stern, and Frank Summers. He counts among the highlights of his career at TAP the successful launching of two influential journals in the field, Psychoanalytic Inquiry and Psychoanalytic Dialogues and the creation of the Relational Perspectives Book Series with the late Stephen Mitchell.

Amid the demands of his editorial workload, Stepansky has always managed to find time for his own scholarship. His first book, A History of Aggression in Freud (1977) was an outgrowth of his Princeton Senior Thesis. In the fall of 1973, it was read appreciatively by Roy Schafer, then at Yale, who commended it to Herbert Schlesinger, then editor of the prestigious Psychological Issues Monograph Series. His second book, In Freud's Shadow: Adler in Context (1983), is widely regarded as the definitive intellectual biography of Alfred Adler. Between 1986 and 1988, he edited and published the three volume Freud: Appraisals and Reappraisals – Contribution to Freud Studies, which introduced analytic readers to a new generation of historically informed Freud scholarship. In 1999, he published Freud, Surgery, and the Surgeons, an interdisciplinary excursion into Freud studies, history of psychoanalysis, and history of medicine that JAPA's reviewer deemed “a splendid, scholarly book: meticulously researched, beautifully written, absorbing from the first to the last page. … a must for all those who are passionate about psychoanalysis and its history.”

In 2006, Stepansky stepped down from his position at The Analytic Press to pursue scholarly studies in the history and sociology of medicine. Among topics of special interest to him are the history of psychiatric and psychoanalytic book and journal publishing in twentieth-century America; psychoanalytic epistemology; the history of alternative medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the interface of psychiatry and medicine in America since World War II. In November, 2009, Other Press released Stepansky’s Psychoanalysis at the Margins, a powerful re-visioning of the history of psychoanalysis in America since World War II informed by his 30-year career as an editor and publisher of psychoanalytic books and journals.

Stepansky retains an academic affiliation with Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he is Interdisciplinary Research Faculty in the Institute for the History of Psychiatry. Equally in demand as a lecturer and workshop leader, he divides his time among his own scholarship; workshops and seminars on clinical writing and writing for publication; and project-related consultations with authors and aspiring authors in the mental health professions. Typically sought out by clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts desirous of high-level editorial assistance, Stepansky has also worked collaboratively with senior writers in fields as diverse as medical sociology, psychopharmacology, surgery, and architecture.top