I am a retired child, adolescent and family therapist whose life reads something like a German Bildungsroman. I began as a student of German literature, ein Germanist, before becoming a Journalist and eventually associate editor of a newspaper. When Yale accepted my future wife as a resident in psychiatry, I moved with her to Haven where I found work at Yale teaching first in Daily Themes and then being the writing tutor in JE. In JE I developed a specialty helping students to write again who were suffering from writing blocks. This in turn led to my becoming a a child therapist. The first third of my career I treated suicidal and out of control teenagers in a combination inpatient/intensive outpatient unit at St. Raphael’s Hospital; the last two thirds were at Clifford Beers Clinic in New Haven where I worked with traumatized and abused children. Many of the techniques I used to help abused children came from my work as an editor as wells as from being a JE and Daily Themes writing tutor.
