Minding the Social Brain

About Jay Evans Harris

Jay Evans Harris MD is a Midwesterner from St. Paul who has spent his professional life in New York City. His interest in psychiatry and the mind grew from trying to understand his mothers epilepsy and his maternal grandmothers psychotic depression. During the Depression and War years his engineer father moved the family to Seattle then back to the Twin Cities and when Jay was in his teens to Baltimore where he later attended Johns Hopkins and the U. of Maryland Medical School. He moved to New York for proximity to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. After internship at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and during his psychiatry residency at Jacobi hospital in the Bronx he began psychoanalytic training continuing throughout his postgraduate training at the Albert Einstein Medical Center. During his 50-year career in psychiatry he was a ward chief at Metropolitan Hospital residency director in psychiatry at Cabrini Medical Center and at Stony Brook University Medical Center and consulting psychiatrist at Riverside Church Pastoral Counseling Center while maintaining an ongoing private practice and holding privileges and academic appointments at several prestigious medical centers in New York and on Long Island. He has worked with prisoners SRO hotel populations street people university students and celebrities. A lifelong interest in psychoanalysis and neuroscience combined with a love of writing has resulted in his six books covering a wide range of intellectual ground from clinical case histories to social neuroscience. His new book Minding the Social Brain brings brain science to bear on the workings of the mind and interdisciplinary social sciences. Jay lives with his wife near Princeton NJ and continues a private practice in Manhattan. He has two daughters and three grandchildren. He likes to think of himself as a cross between a laid-back Jewish Minnesotan and a New Yorker with street cred.