"Rewriting your Personal Scripts" with Jeff Katzman and Dan O'Connor

Kat and Alex are joined by Jeff Katzman, M.D. and Dan O'Connor the authors of the book Life Unscripted: Using Improv Principles to Get Unstuck, Boost Confidence, and Transform Your Life. They discuss why it is we can find ourselves stuck in performances that can feel scripted and limiting and how we can break out of them. Dan offers us some advice on turning our inner critics into internal cheerleaders. Jeff offers some insight into why improv can be a powerful tool for the medical profession and in what ways therapy and improv sessions reflect one another. 

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JEFF KATZMAN, M.D.  studied at Stanford University where he received his BA, UC San Diego for medical school, and then UCLA for his psychiatry residency where he was on faculty for four years before moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine where he is Vice Chair in charge of all clinical services. Before this, he ran Behavioral Health Care at the New Mexico VA Medical Center specializing in treating veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He has been voted a TopDoc by Albuquerque: The Magazine every year since 2002. He has been awarded numerous teaching awards in New Mexico where he lectures widely. He has been awarded every possible faculty award in his Department, including recent recognition by a new award as the Department of Psychiatry’s most outstanding faculty mentor. He is currently the Chair of the Education Committee of the American Association of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry (AAPDP). He lectures regularly at approximately four national psychiatric conferences a year on the topics of psychodynamic psychotherapy, attachment, applied improvisation, and educational techniques and this year will be presenting ideas about improvisation and psychotherapy training to the national meetings of the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.

Jeff has extensive experience as a writer. He is widely published in academic journals of high regard, with a very high profile on ResearchGate demonstrating his current contact with readers. At the moment, he has published 20 journal articles, cited by other authors 245  times. He has been recognized internationally for his work in human attachment following his group’s hallmark study involving Vietnam Combat Veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Most recently, he was invited to write a summary article on the concepts of human attachment and the importance of this field to students of depth psychotherapy t in the journal Psychodynamic Psychiatry. He has also written the chapter on Adjustment Disorders in the last three editions of Sadock and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, the most influential text in the field, and the chapter on Impulse Disorders the edition prior. Jeff published a novel, The Storymaker, a semifinalist in the Amazon breakthrough novel competition with an extremely positive response from readers. Jeff has also developed a national reputation in the application of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. He has presented this work at the most prestigious psychiatric conferences including the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the Association for Academic Psychiatry (AAP), and the American Association of Directors of Residency Training Programs (AAPDP).

Additionally, Jeff has been trained extensively in improvisational theater through Second City in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Theater Sports, and Gorilla Tango T