Siri Hustvedt, PhD, 2025
/Dr. Siri Hustvedt’s extraordinary work mines rich seams in psychoanalysis, literature, and culture and has significantly advanced the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis in current intellectual and cultural discourse. An international author of both fiction and non-fiction, Hustvedt examines the intersections of psychoanalysis with art, philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, and the history of medicine. Hustvedt’s work demonstrates the profound impact that psychoanalytic theory and practice continue to have on people’s lives today. Her work draws upon the insights of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Bion, and Solms. Rejecting the notion that psychoanalytic thinking is outdated or confined to the past, Hustvedt’s writings resonate with both practitioners and general audiences.
Her acclaimed works include A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (Simon and Schuster, 2016) and Memories of the Future: A Novel (Simon and Schuster, 2019). In Hustvedt’s recent paper, “Umbilical Phantoms” published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 103, no. 2, 2022, she regarded umbilical phantoms as part of a defensive amnesia about early bodily connectivity to the mother that haunts both psychoanalysis and philosophy. Hustvedt is lecturer in the Dewitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and teaches a monthly seminar in narrative psychiatry to residents. Her lectures and workshops have introduced new ways of thinking about the practice of medicine and redefining the relationship between clinician and patient that has had a lasting effect on medical practice.