About
Dr. Ed Shapiro was born in 1941 in Boston to second-generation Ukrainian-Jewish parents. He majored in Russian language and literature at Yale traveling to the Soviet Union with the Yale Russian Chorus. At Stanford University, he received a master's degree in Anthropology, studying native medicine in Tobago, West Indies. With grants from the US Public Health Service, he worked with migrant workers in California and went to Israel to study suicide in Palestinian villages after the 7-day war before graduating from Harvard Medical School. He is certified in psychoanalysis by the American Psychoanalytic Association, and is a Training and Supervising Analyst.  As a Clinical Associate at the National Institute of Mental Health, he studied families and adolescents and returned to Boston to direct the Adolescent and Family Treatment and Study Center at McLean Hospital, becoming the Director of Psychosocial Training and Consultation. He was Clinical Professor at the Yale Child Study Center and medical director/CEO of the Austen Riggs Center from 1991-2011. He has published over fifty articles on human development, organizational and family functioning, and personality disorders, presenting papers in the country and abroad. With the former Dean of Westminster, A. Wesley Carr, Ph.D., he published Lost in Familiar Places: Creating New Connections between the Individual and Society (Yale, 1991), and edited The Inner World in the Outer World: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Yale, 1997). His recent book, Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-reflective Institutions, Leaders, and Citizens was published by Phoenix in 2020. He is on the board of the International Dialogue Initiative and on the advisory board of Partners Confronting Collective Atrocities. He is a Principal in the Boswell Group of New York.

Dr. Shapiro has received the Felix and Helene Deutsch Scientific Award from the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, the Research Prize from the Society for Family Therapy and Research, and the Isenberg Teaching Award from McLean Hospital. In 2007, he was named Outstanding Psychiatrist for Advancement of the Profession by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Association and since 2011 has been listed on the US News & World Report’s list of “Top Doctors’.
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My work with Ed Shapiro goes back 30 years. We have consulted together many times to clients in various organisations and have jointly written Lost in Familiar Places. We have also staffed group relations events. Ed is a brilliant clinician. But more than that he is also an insightful organizational consultant. He has an enviable facility to hear what people are trying to say and to clarify it. Much of his skill is due to the fact of his own ability to receive consultation to himself and his institutions.
Wesley Carr
Retired Dean, Westminster Abbey
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Ed brings an extraordinary blend of systems understanding, process sensitivity and clinical acuity to his consulting practice. I have worked with Ed in several settings and, without fail, he has a huge and enormously productive impact. I would enthusiastically recommend him to any organization wanting to address thorny problems, implement significant change, or improve performance.
James Krantz
Principal, WorkLab
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I have relied on Ed's consultation several times in my role as the director of a nationally renowned treatment program affiliated with a leading academic medical center. Ed's depth of experience as a highly accomplished organizational executive, insight into both conscious and unconscious systemic processes, and his deep respect for the ways in which organizations are always working at a task, even if temporarily occluded from view, truly set him apart in his ability to help organizational leaders gain perspective on multi-layered, complex, and seemingly intractable dilemmas. I have repeatedly found his perspective invaluable. Ed truly knows how to listen, and even more, he helps leaders and organizations discover their own creative solutions through the support and understanding he provides. He does all of this with brilliance, grace, good humor, dignity and uncompromising integrity. Of all the consultants I could choose from, I can think of no other organizational consultant to have by my side.
Michael Groat, PhD
Silver Hill Hospital
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Ed has a unique grasp of organizational dynamics and leadership tensions and the processes necessary to link people in different roles to a shared organizational task. His work is deep and insightful, going well "below the surface" to get to core issues.
Dwight Jewson, Ph.D.
Owner, SFI
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I have known Ed over the 20 years he has been medical director/CEO at Austen Riggs. He is a superb clinician, gifted teacher, highly competent manager and innovative leader who has led Riggs through major change and growth without sacrificing his or the institution's integrity or commitment to a focused and idealistic mission.
Eric Plakun
Medical Director/CEO of Austen Riggs Center
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