Our Faculty and Staff

John S. Auerbach, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Nova Southeastern University. He earned his A.B. in psychology (honors) and history from Brown University, where he was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical-community psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, now renamed the University at Buffalo. He completed his predoctoral internship at the West Haven Veterans Affairs Medical School (VAMC), now part of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. For 32 years, he was an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs, working in the areas of severe mental illness, trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder, personality disorder, and substance use disorder. He has been director of the Day Hospital at the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC), coordinator of the Post Traumatic Stress Program at the Mountain Home (Johnson City, TN) VAMC, and assistant coordinator of Residential Substance Use Disorder Program in the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System. He also has had faculty appointments in Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the James H. Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University, and the University of Florida College of Medicine.

He is an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a fellow of the Society for Personality Assessment. He is a recipient of the Appalachian Psychoanalytic Society’s Hans H. Strupp Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship, Teaching, and Mentorship. He was the chief presenter of the Society for Personality Assessment’s 2016 Marguerite R. Hertz Memorial Award, given to honor Sidney J. Blatt for his lifetime contributions to personality assessment. He has been president of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society and also of East Tennessee’s Intermountain Psychological Association. He has authored or coauthored more than 50 professional publications and has given more than 80 professional presentations, mainly in the areas of narcissism; borderline personality disorder; performance-based and projective assessments, especially with the Object Relations Inventory; relational-intersubjectivity theory; attachment theory; mentalization and mentalization-based therapy; and psychological trauma. He maintains a private practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.