Mark Sirkin
Mark I. Sirkin is an American clinical psychologist. He was the Director of the Robert M. Beren Center of the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University. Following his doctoral work, Sirkin took a position on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Rochester Medical Center, where he worked with Professor Lyman Wynne. He later became Director of Group Training and Research at the Department of Psychiatry. Sirkin was Chairman of the American Family Foundation Psychology Committee, and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Cultic Studies Journal. With Uri Rueveni, of the University of Houston, Sirkin studied the application of network therapy to the treatment of relational disorders relating to cults. It builds upon his early theoretical and clinical work on relational disorders. The network therapy study appeared in Contemporary Family Therapy. Specifically, that study looked at the application of an intervention technique in order to help the family of an individual who had joined a group in which one member claimed to be the Messiah. The researchers utilized a team of network specialists, and the study consisted of a pre-network planning meeting, the network meeting itself which included about 70 individuals and took place over the course of four hours, and follow-up meetings with subgroups within the network. Drs. Rueveni and Sirkin's study has been cited in later work in the journal Psychopathology and in the book, Moving Up: Positive Psychology, by Darrell Franken, Sirkin has since gone on to consult to organizations including family-held companies, law firms, and large multi-national and publicly held corporations. He is author of The Secret Life of Corporations: Understanding the True Nature of Business, New Chrysalis Press, 2004, which looks at organizations as complex systems that are biological in nature. He is founding chair, and current co-chair, of the Family Business SIG of the Society of Consulting Psychologists (Division 13 of the APA).