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