Drew Westen
| Drew Westen | |
|---|---|
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | Emory University, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, Boston University |
| Alma mater |
Harvard University University of Sussex University of Michigan |
| Known for | Confirmation bias in politics, SWAP-200 |
Drew Westen is professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; the founder of Westen Strategies, LLC, a strategic messaging consulting firm to nonprofits and political organizations; and a writer. He is also co-founder, with Joel Weinberger, of Implicit Strategies, a market research firm that measures consumers' unconscious responses to advertising and brands.
He grew up in North Carolina and Georgia, and received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, a Master of Arts in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex (England), and a Doctor of Philosophy in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, where he taught introductory psychology for several years.
Westen is a strategic messaging consultant for major nonprofit organizations and a frequent consultant or advisor to progressive and Democratic organizations, including the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses.
In addition, Westen is a frequent commentator on television, radio, in print, and online, and has been a frequent contributor to the opinion page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN.com and the Huffington Post. His 2011 article on Obama's leadership in the Sunday New York Times was one of the most widely read pieces in the history of the Sunday Times and drew considerable attention, including from the White House. The President and his close advisors were so incensed and concerned about its impact, because it captured popular opinion at the time about his leadership style, that they sent out a thirty-plus page email of talking points to friendly journalists to use when he was interviewed on television and radio.
His academic research spans over many areas, most of it focused on the assessment, classification, and diagnosis of mental disorders in adults and adolescents, with a particular focus on personality disorders, although he has also done research on eating disorders, unconscious processes, mood disorders, the psychological processes underlying the capacity or incapacity to maintain intimate relationships, attachment, psychological anthropology, social and affective neuroscience, and a number of other topics. He has made numerous contributions to the literature in psychoanalysis, attempting to integrate it with empirical psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. He has expressed concern, however, that psychoanalysts should not only be able to diagnose psychological dynamics but also to be able to make traditional diagnoses, which often have treatment implications that a single-minded focus on psychoanalytic case formulation should not, but often does, obscure their vision. After several years at the University of Michigan, he then moved to Harvard University, where he was Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Chief Psychologist at the Cambridge Hospital.
...
Wikipedia