About the Author
A. J. Malerstein received his Medical Degree from the Chicago Medical School. He is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.
For eight years, he was a researcher and teacher at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at the University of California San Francisco. For most of his career, he practiced clinical psychiatry. He worked full-time treating patients in the office, in the hospital, and in the jail or prison system.
His publications include works on the theory of depression, on computerized psychiatric data systems, and on psychological and physiological studies of Korsakov’s syndrome—a condition that is characterized by great difficulty in learning new information.
During the past 25 years, he collaborated with Mary Ahern. Their theory of character formation integrates clinical observations in adults with stages of cognitive development in children. They wrote two books: one on theory—A Piagetian Model of Character Structure; the other on application of the theory—Psychotherapy and Character Structure. In addition, Malerstein wrote The Conscious Mind—a book that was precursor to his current book posted here on his website.
Most recently (with the help of Ross Gibson, Steven Pulos, and Josephine Arasteh), Ahern and Malerstein have completed empirical studies that confirm their theory. Such empirical confirmation of a psychodynamic theory of character structure—particularly the prediction of adult character types from kinds of early care giving—is unusual, if not unique.
