ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Amir Levine, who grew up in Israel and Canada, has always had a
fascination with biology and the brain. His mother, a popular science editor
who valued creativity and self-motivation, allowed him to stay home from
school whenever he wanted and study what interested him. Although this
freedom sometimes got him into trouble, during high school he wrote his
first large-scale work, about birds of prey in the Bible and in ancient
Assyria and Babylon. His thesis examined the evolution of symbolism from
a culture of multiple deities to one of monotheism. After high school,
Levine served as a press liaison in the Israeli army. He worked with
renowned journalists such as Thomas Friedman, Glenn Frankel, and Ted
Koppel, and was awarded a citation of excellence.
After his compulsory army service, having developed a passion for
working with people as well as a love for science, Levine enrolled in
medical school at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he received
numerous awards. During medical school, he organized student meetings
with Dr. Eiferman, a psychoanalyst, to discuss how doctors can preserve
their sensitivity to the hospitalized patients’ needs while negotiating a
complex hospital hierarchy. He was awarded the faculty prize for his
graduation thesis, “Human Sexuality Viewed from the Perspective of
Childhood Gender Nonconformity,” which was later adapted for a
university seminar.
Levine’s interest in human behavior led him to a residency in adult
psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University/New
York State Psychiatric Institute, where he was ranked first in his class for
three consecutive years. He received several awards, including an American
Psychoanalytic Fellowship, which gave him a rare opportunity to work with
a world-renowned psychoanalyst, the late Jacob Arlow. Levine then
specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry. While working in a
therapeutic nursery with mothers with posttraumatic stress disorder and
their toddlers, he witnessed the power of attachment to heal and realized the
importance of attachment principles in the daily lives of adults as well as