- John Suler
Infobox academic
name = John Suler
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birth_date =January 17 1955
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residence =United States
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ethnicity = Caucasian
field = Psychologist
work_institutions = Rider University
alma_mater = State University of New York at Buffalo
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known_for = Cyberpsychology
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footnotes =Dr. John Suler is a Professor in Psychology at
Rider University . He received his bachelors degree in psychology from theState University of New York at Stony Brook in 1977, where he studied in the hard core behavioral psychology department, while also taking philosophy courses onFreud , existentialism, and thanatology. He was valedectorian of his class at Stony Brook. Dr. Suler received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1982, where he benefited from mentors such asEd Katkin ,Joe Masling ,Murray Levine , andArlene Burrows .Dr. Suler learned that being both a clinician and scientist indeed is possible. After leaving Buffalo, he did a year internship in the Department of Psychiatry at the Hospital of the
University of Connecticut . From there he moved on to Rider University's Psychology Department, while also continuing post-graduate psychotherapy training for 12 years in a clinical group led byNancy McWilliams , a highly regarded psychoanalytic psychologist. Dr. Suler also had the worked withLloyd Silverman on the use of imagery techniques in psychotherapy.Over the years, Dr. Suler's professional and academic work has progressed through several stages. Starting in graduate school, he did quite a bit of research on mental imagery and creativity. As a practicing psychotherapist, he was especially interested in the application of these topics to clinical work.
Mental imagery and creativity both involve distinctly non-verbal and "non-rational" processes, which partially explains why Dr. Suler later became intrigued by the relationship betweeneastern philosophy and western psychology, especiallypsychoanalytic theory . It was the evolution of computers and the internet into an imagistic (sensory, associational) medium that first captured his imagination, and is now deeply immersed in the development of a "psychology of cyberspace."John Suler's theories and writings about the Psychology of
Cyberspace have helped to place context around online social interactions and behaviors typically well-understood by psychologists, but less understood by laypeople. He was one of the first psychologists to write extensively about the human social experience of being online from such a vantage point, bringing together a mix of eastern philosophy, research, and his own observations in a variety of online social and gaming environments.Dr. Suler is also one of the founding members of
ISMHO . Recently, Dr. Suler is exploring the intersection of psychology and photography.Bibliography
* [http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html The Psychology of Cyberspace] by Dr. John Suler
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