Sanford L. Drob is a philosopher, forensic psychologist, and painter, who is best known for his efforts to develop a universalist rational-mystical theology through a synthesis of Jewish mysticism and contemporary thought. As an artist, Drob has worked to update and resignify Jewish and other mystical and archetypal themes, and to address basic philosophical and theological questions through the medium of representational, narrative painting. His (In)humanity Triptych (2013), for example, reinterprets three biblical narratives, the Expulsion from Eden, the Sacrifice of Noah, and Esther’s Accusation of Haman, through the lens of the Holocaust and the basic Kabbalistic themes of exile, rupture and repair. His Midrash on Time (2014) provides a new mythological and philosophical perspective on the origin of time, death and the arts. And his Post-humanity Triptych (2015) testifies to the fate of religion in a world within which humankind has brought about its own destruction and demise. Several of his recent paintings explore the archetypal nature of recent political events in America.

Drob is a prolific author. In a series of books (Symbols of the Kabbalah, 2000, Kabbalistic Metaphors, 2000, Kabbalah and Postmodernism, 2009,) as well as on his website www.newkabbalah.com, Drob demonstrates how the symbols of the Lurianic Kabbalah articulate a “basic metaphor” that is reprised in a philosophical idiom in the writings of such later thinkers as Hegel, Freud, Jung and Derrida, and which serves as a compelling model for understanding the world and the place of humanity within it. Drob is also known for his writings on the psychologist C. G. Jung. His most recent books, Kabbalistic Visions: C. G. Jung and Jewish Mysticism (2010), and Reading the Red Book: An Interpretive Guide to C. G. Jung’s Liber Novus (2012) approach Jung from a philosophical and a psychological point of view.

Drob holds doctorates in philosophy from Boston University, and in clinical psychology from Long Island University. For many years he served as the Senior Forensic Psychologist and Director of Psychological Assessment at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He is currently on the Core Faculty of the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology of Fielding Graduate University, where he teaches classes in Humanistic/ Existential psychology, forensic psychology and psychological assessment. He is also on the faculties of the C. G. Jung Institute and C. G. Jung Foundation in New York City where he lectures on Jung’s thought and art, Jewish Mysticism and the intersection between mysticism, philosophy and psychology.  He maintains an active practice in forensic psychology in New York City.