Biography

Michael Lerner is a political activist, and the editor of Tikkun, a prominent progressive Jewish and interfaith magazine based in Berkeley, California.

Lerner received a B.A. from Columbia University, studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and became a protégé of Abraham Joshua Heschel. In 1964, he started his graduate studies in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually earning in 1972 a Ph.D. in philosophy. He served as teaching assistant to professors Richard Lichtman, Thomas Nagel, Hubert Dreyfus, and (visiting from UCSD) Herbert Marcuse, and studied with Michael Scriven, Sheldon Wolin, Philip Selznick, Benson Mates, John Searle, and others. His dissertation argued for an objective foundation to ethics and against various forms of ethical relativism.

After completing his Ph.D. Lerner moved to Hartford, Connecticut where he served as professor of philosophy at Trinity College until 1975, when he moved back to Berkeley, joined the faculty at the University of California in the Field Studies program and taught law and economics until 1976 when he accepted a position at Sonoma State University for one year in sociology, teaching courses in social psychology. Meanwhile, he completed a second Ph.D. in 1977, this one is social/clinical psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley.

In 1976 Lerner founded the Institute for Labor and Mental Health to work with the labor movement and do research on the psychodynamics of American society. In 1979 he received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to train union shop stewards as agents of prevention for mental health disorders, and he simultaneously extended his previous study of the psychodynamics of American society. With a subsequent grant from the NIMH he studied American politics and reported that "a spiritual crisis" was at the heart of the political transformation of American society as well as at the heart of much of the psychic pain that was being treated in individual therapy.