Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

While some emotional isolation can help a leader, serving to protect them from involvement in unhealthy regressive employee practices, it can damage too. If too great, it frustrates the normal dependency needs of their staff though the warmth of managers can compensate for this.

In these businesses, it may seem as if no one  Read More 

With more information becoming known, I can't help thinking that the killer's behavior had little to do with his Army service and much with his childhood experiences and personality. His mother was a drug addict and he suffered many foster family placements. He had long been impulsive, having once thrown a foster brother down  Read More 

These killings reminded me of the past killing of the New York City psychologist (Fahey) by a colleague's patient. The psychiatrist had seen him briefly, seventeen years before. Now, the patient brought a hatchet, intending to kidnap the psychiatrist, hold him for ransom, and get his mother out of a nursing home. Fahey heard  Read More 

Once, while driving at night along a lonely, poorly lighted road in Mid-America, my car got caught on the divider as I made a turn. I left the car and stood staring, wondering what to do for this was before the era of cellphones.
A car containing four huge guys stopped opposite me. As  Read More 

Though people with severe obsessive-compulsive traits, having a diagnosable disorder, can hinder an organization's operation, these basic characteristics of orderliness, precision, and properly delegating authority, are beneficial in a milder form. Some very successful managers have obsessive-compulsive natures.

Danger arises when the leader has an excessive need for order and control since these demands  Read More 

Organizational authority is granted a manager because of its needs. To accomplish tasks which it can achieve using the leader's skills and experience. And, recognizing this logic, employees submit to the manager's authority. But during stressful times, a leader's pathological characteristics can emerge such as the schizoid feature of isolation.

Now, the leader isolates  Read More 

Once, at a Long Island community hospital, a co-worker/psychiatrist revealed his anxiety: a hospitalized patient had made murder threats against President Reagan. The in-patient unit was only for short-term treatment, the patient must soon be released, and the doctor didn’t know what to do. “Call the Secret Service,” I advised. He did,  Read More 

Though loving the long-running TV series "24," I've often found it too painful to view. So greatly that I stopped watching long before its concluding episode. Considering why, I concluded that some script elements of 24 reawaken unconscious childhood fears. "24" portrays a toddler's world: one of great, continuing danger; one where "betrayal" is constant, in the  Read More 

In a well-received book some years ago, a psychiatrist described his mother’s naked body being used as a card-playing table by his father and cronies. In a paper by a psychoanalyst-psychiatrist (Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, “The Sad Soul of the Psychiatrist,” early 1970s), it was stated that clinicians who treat children do  Read More 

(!) Mother speaking to her teenage sons at the breakfast table: “I do everything for you and our neighbor does nothing for her kids. She spends all the money on herself, treats them like shit, and they kiss her ass.” A son’s response: “OK, ma. Bend over and we’ll kiss your ass.”

(2) A  Read More