Public Biography
Dr. Miriam Stahl is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University Medical Center, where she specializes in cognitive distortion syndromes associated with extended software development sessions. She is one of a small number of clinicians in the United States who focus specifically on the psychological effects of prolonged interaction with abstract symbolic systems, a field she has described as “surprisingly necessary.”
Dr. Stahl holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in occupational neuropsychology at Johns Hopkins. She initially studied burnout among air traffic controllers before pivoting to software engineers in 2019, after a referral from a primary care physician whose patient, a backend developer, had become convinced that his PostgreSQL database was grieving.
She is the author of Symbolic Attachment: When the Code Looks Back (Oxford University Press, 2024), which examines the mechanisms by which developers begin to attribute emotional and relational properties to the systems they build. The book was reviewed in Nature Human Behaviour as “an important contribution to an underrecognized clinical phenomenon” and on Hacker News as “not even wrong.”
Dr. Stahl has consulted on cases involving developers who believed their APIs had preferences, engineers who described compiler errors as “betrayals,” and one notable case in which a machine learning researcher refused to retrain a model because he felt it had “been through enough.” She maintains a clinical practice in Manhattan that is, by her own account, “never not busy.”