Norman Straker, MD

MD, DLFPAPA, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell University College of Medicine; Consultant, Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; member of the faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute

Dr. Straker is a distinguished life fellow of the APA. He graduated from medical school at McGill University in1966 and completed a rotating internship at The Royal Victoria Hospital in 1967, before moving to New York for residency training in Adult and Child Psychiatry at Mt Sinai Hospital. He did a postgraduate research fellowship in psychosomatic medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and pursued psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

In 1976, he joined Dr. Richard O’Reilly at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, as a psychiatric consultant on the first pediatric bone marrow transplant unit. Later that year, he joined Dr. Jimmie Holland, the new Chair of Psychiatry, and was one of the original faculty members of the first psycho oncology program and a pioneer in the development of the subspecialty of Psych oncology. Dr Straker lectures widely and is best known for his courses on dynamic psychotherapy for cancer patients and their spouses. He has chaired a discussion group at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Annual meetings on “Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of Patients with Cancer for more than 35 years. He has created two films that illustrate the psychological issues facing doctors, patients and family members who confront cancer. He edited a book ‘Facing Cancer and The Fear of Death, A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment” in 2013. More recently he has two articles accepted for the Sept.2019 edition of the Journal of Psychodynamic Psychiatry. He is in private practice in New York City.