From a Lincoln Learner to a Psychologist and Author!

Meet Dr. Albert Brok: former student, psychoanalyst, and author. Discover how he blends art and psychology in his most recent book!

Where are our former students now? It´s time to give the spotlight to Dr. Albert Brok, an alum who is now a psychologist, a psychoanalyst, and the author of the book Play, Illusion, Reality, and Trauma: What Can a Psychoanalyst Learn from Charlie Chaplin?, published in 2020 and available on Amazon and IP Books.

Dr. Brok attended the American Grammar and High School in the 50s, an institution connected to Lincoln's history. After moving from Argentina to the United States, he pursued his fascination for the human mind at The New School for Social Research, where he earned his PhD in Psychology.

His academic career includes serving as the Chairman of Clinical Psychology at The New School’s Graduate Faculty and as a Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Today, he is the Director of Training for Group and Couple Therapy at the Training Institute for Mental Health (TIMH) in New York. All of his professional background eventually led to the creation of his most recent book, which offers a look at the long career of Charlie Chaplin, using his relationship with the audience as a metaphor for the analyst as audience to his patient and vice versa. As the blurb details:

Patient and analyst, audience and artist, are mutually and hopefully salubriously intertwined as "involved witnesses" with each other's communication, be they verbal or non-verbal. (...) I will also discuss the idea of an aesthetic therapeutic contract and the differentiation of enactments from what I have come to term "actments," (Brok 2014, 2016), as well as the paradox of reality, illusion, and the effects of trauma in human experience.

Previously, in 2012, he published with a group of other authors Una travesía por la fábrica de los sueños: Intersección entre Cine y Psicoanálisis, a book that “is a compilation of writings located at the intersection of Cinema and Psychoanalysis.” 

As it seems, blending psychology and the arts is not only something that Albert Brok tackles with curiosity and passion, but it is also a profound exploration of the intrigue and magic found in life.