Jennifer I. Downey, MD

Jennifer Downey is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and a member of the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.

Following graduation from medical school and residency in psychiatry at Columbia, she held a 5-year Research Scientist Development Award from NIMH and attended the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, graduating with a certificate in Psychoanalysis.

Dr. Downey has been a researcher, educator and clinical scholar in the areas of women's health, psychoanalysis and sexuality. Her early research concerned female sex hormones, and she wrote a series of influential papers and chapters on the reproductive cycle and psychiatric conditions in women. This work discussed not only infertility but adolescent sexuality, premenstrual affective symptoms, the treatment of psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and post-partum, and emotional effects of cancers of the reproductive tract in women.

In the early 1990's Dr. Downey began a collaboration with Dr. Richard C. Friedman. Since then the two have published many articles and books together. An article written at the invitation of the editors of the NEJM was widely influential in changing attitudes about homosexuality in the medical profession.

Their most recent book was published by Columbia University Press in 2002. This book, which achieved widespread acclaim, was reissued in paperback as Sexual Orientation and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Sexual Science and Clinical Practice (2008).

In 2008 Dr. Downey was chosen as the first Teichner Scholar by the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry (AAPDP) and the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training (AADPRT). She served as a visiting scholar of psychodynamic education at the University of Kentucky.

Jennifer Downey lives and works in New York City where she maintains a practice in psychodynamic psychiatry and teaches in the Psychiatric Residency and Psychoanalytic Center at Columbia.