Now retired, Burstein is a Professor Emeritus in psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and was a practicing psychoanalyst for many years.
He served as Head of the Psychology Department at Southeastern Louisiana University from 2000-2006 and as president of the Louisiana Conference of the American Association of University Professors from 2006-2010.
He is a former faculty member of the New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center.

He is a member of Inklings, a writers’ critique group in Mandeville, Louisiana.
He writes a monthly film review, A Shrink at the Flicks, for The Psychology Times, an award winning e-newspaper. He is a reader for Silver Blade, a fiction quarterly. His first novella, The Owl, is available on Amazon, and some of his flash fiction is archived on www.theflashfictionpress.org