Edward Ryan, PhD

Edward Ryan, Ph.D. graduated from Brooklyn College, CUNY, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Honors in Psychology, and was a Danforth Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical Psychology. He is currently an Associate Clinical Professor in the Yale Psychiatry Department and in private practice in New Haven. He has served as a training and supervising psychologist in the Yale Long-Term Care Clinic. He has also served as Associate Chief Psychologist at the West Haven Division of VA CT Healthcare. At the VA, he served as: Clinical Director of the Northeast Regional Center for the Treatment of Schizophrenia, an inpatient program integrating psychoanalytic psychotherapy, group and family therapy, and therapeutic community; Chief of the Veterans Resource Program, an inpatient program integrating psychoanalytic psychotherapy with psychosocial rehabilitation; Principal Investigator for two major research grants, focused on evaluation of the process and outcome of those inpatient programs; Senior Supervising and Training Psychologist in the Outpatient Clinic, including Co-Director of the General Clinic. For over forty years he has taught and supervised psychiatric residents and psychology graduate students at the VA and at Yale. He has published and presented papers on a range of topics – inpatient treatment, therapeutic community, schizophrenia, psychosis and recovery, object relations theory, early memories, psychotherapy, meditation and psychoanalysis, and spiritual enlightenment. He has received awards for teaching, clinical service, and leadership. Throughout the years he has met with people in psychotherapy in several settings and in his private practice.

He has practiced insight meditation for thirty years and has served on the Board of Directors of the Insight Meditation Society, the flagship training center for insight mediation in America. With his wife, the internationally renowned poet, Sylvia Forges-Ryan, he published Take A Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace, a collection of Sylvia’s award-winning haiku and his responses from a meditative point of view. The book has been accepted into the American Literature Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.