Jeffrey Deitz

Personal information

First name

Jeffrey

Last name

Deitz

Institutional affiliation

Self-employed Author
Assistant Professor Psychiatry.
Frank Netter School of Medicine, Quinnipiac University

Narratological interest

I am a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and author, whose interests include the psychology of story, and how author?s (fiction and non-fiction) personal narratives influence character and plot in their work.

Story is encoded into mind and brain along with the emotional contexts in which the narrative takes place. Thus, the human being is the protagonist in his struggles against such invariant antagonists of life such as death, aging, and uncertainty. People?s sense of self is the accumulation of personal narratives.

Emotions are the bedrock within which stories are embedded Thus, story-telling (oral and written, artistic, musical, etc.) is an interpersonal transaction and can never be understood without attention to the emotional lives of creator and his or her audience.

I have written extensively for the professional literature on psychotherapy and about to publish my first novel about an enduring connection between an therapist on patient. The centrality of story-telling is an essential theme of the book.