Dr. Steven Reisner, Ph.D., is Senior Faculty and Supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, in New York City. He also serves on the faculties of the Department of Psychiatry and the Psychoanalytic Institute at the New York University Medical School, and has been Adjunct Professor in the Program in Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, Teachers College. He is presently a Psychological Ethics Advisor to Physicians for Human Rights, where he co-authored the report Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program.
Dr. Reisner has worked in diverse roles as a consultant in the effects of war, exile, and torture, including training psychiatrists in Iraq to treat survivors of Saddam Hussein’s torture regime, and training returning refugees in Kosovo to use theater and testimony to address the trauma of exile. He is a consultant to the clinical staff at the United Nations helping to train and supervise counselors responsible for the health and wellbeing of UN staff in over 150 countries. Formerly, Dr. Reisner was Chief Psychologist at Regent Hospital in New York City. His publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Psychoanalysis, and elsewhere.
Dr. Reisner’s parents are both Holocaust survivors. His father was detained by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the early 1940s and subjected to the psychological torture techniques of sleep deprivation and sensory overload. His mother was a prisoner at the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
In 2008, Dr. Reisner ran for American Psychological Association (APA) president. The main thrust of his campaign was that psychologists should not be involved in torture in any way.
