Dr. Joel Whitebrook (’78) has been chosen to receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award at The New School for Social Research’s 2009 graduation ceremony on May 22.

Joel Whitebook’s career has been marked by an attempt to integrate his dual training as a philosopher and as a psychoanalyst. He received his BA in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, where he was a prominent member of the Student Movement. He pursued his graduate work in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and earned his PhD in 1978, writing a dissertation on the economy and the polity in Aristotle and Hegel. In that year he also joined the editorial board of Telos, a journal that played a major role in introducing the Western Marxian tradition in the United States.

Dr. Whitebook received a second doctorate in Clinical Psychology from CUNY in 1984, entered private practice in 1986, and completed his psychoanalytic training at the New York Freudian Society in 1990. Since 2002, he has been an assistant clinical professor of Psychology (in Psychiatry) at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.

Dr. Whitebook’s area of research is psychoanalysis and critical theory. In this first book, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory, he sought to continue the Frankfurt School’s attempt to integrate the latest findings in psychoanalysis with social theory. In his wide-ranging articles for psychoanalytic, cultural, and philosophical journals, he has used psychoanalysis to elucidate problems in contemporary philosophy and philosophy to elucidate current topics in psychoanalytic theory. His most recent book, Der gefesselte Odysseus: Studien zur Kritischen Theorie und Psychoanalyse, was published in February. He is currently writing an intellectual biography of Freud for Cambridge University Press.