Born in 1948, in Manhattan, to two left-wing psychotherapists. I spent my childhood in Queens and my adolescence in Wantagh, a suburb of New York, graduating from high school at 16.
He earned a first degree in philosophy and psychology from Harvard. Then he worked for 18 months in psychiatric hospitals as an assistant to the well-known psychiatrist Gideon Seaman.
He earned his second medical degree in 1975 at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, now renamed Icahn. I specialized in internal medicine at the Residency Program in Social Medicine in the Bronx. Soon after, I moved to Italy in 1978 with my first husband, an Italian engineer. She married her second husband, American composer Alvin Curran, in 2003.
She passed the State Exam in 1979. Since 1980 I have worked in a series of private practices, first alone and then together with other colleagues. I have been following many patients for more than forty years. Among my patients I count other poets, politicians, diplomats, artists, musicians, priests, nuns, friars, domestic workers, expatriate intellectuals, international officials, mechanics. They are more or less a third Italians, a third Americans, a third “others” from almost every nation in the world.
In addition to clinical work, I have a research career in the field of scientific psychosomatic medicine, also obtaining grants from the US National Institutes of Health, working not only in Italy but also in collaboration with the Research Center for Prevention and Health in Denmark, at the Charité hospital in Berlin and at the Human Population Laboratory in Berkeley; producing nearly 70 articles as first author. I also collaborated with my mother, psychologist Phyllis Levenstein, on her scientific works and on the second edition of her book “Messages From Home” about the Parent-Child Home Program she created.