Sylvia E. Flescher, MD, is a graduate of Barnard College and New York Medical College. She trained in psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center and in psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. She is on the faculty at Mount Sinai and is past president of the New Jersey Psychoanalytic Society. For several decades she has been part of the New Directions writing community in Washington D.C., both as student and as faculty. Her paper “Googling for Ghosts: a Meditation on Writer’s Block, Mourning and the Holocaust” appeared in the Psychoanalytic Review, and her chapter “Elsa Lost and Found” is included in the anthology On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence. Married to a film editor, Sylvia has two daughters and two grandsons. She lives and practices in Bergen County, New Jersey. The Reluctant Psychoanalyst is her first book.