In her first career Dr Beattie taught Chinese history at Cambridge and at Yale Universities. In her second career, as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, she has specialized in the treatment of eating and related disorders, and has a particular interest in working with adults from diverse cultural backgrounds and creative individuals or students with work inhibitions. She teaches both in the Columbia Department of Psychiatry and at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center. Her current research is mainly in literature (particularly the work of Robert Louis Stevenson) and in psychoanalytic life-writing; also the Scottish contribution to psychoanalysis, notably that of W. R. D. Fairbairn. She received the Beller Award (for contributions to psychoanalytic theory) from the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center in 2001.