Dr. George J. Makari attended Brown University and received his BA in 1982; then received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1987. He completed his psychiatric residency at the Payne Whitney Clinic, then served as a Reader's Digest Research Fellow in the Weill Medical College Department of Psychiatry.  Dr. Makari completed Psychoanalytic training at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research at Columbia University in 1997. He is a Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts and Director of the Long Term Psychotherapy Clinic in the Payne Whitney Clinic.

He is the author of Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, as well as the Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Prejudice Award, and a New York Times Editor's Choice. He is also the author of two widely acclaimed histories, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (W.W Norton, 2015) and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (HarperCollins, 2008). His books have been translated into eight languages, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lapham's Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Cabinet, and the Lancet. Dr. Makari is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Benjamin Rush Award from the American Psychiatric Association and the Sigmund Freud Award from the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians.