From the earliest time, “who are you?” “who am I?” and “how can we meet each other?” have been alive in my daily life. These questions underpin an abiding interest in the formation of identity and sense of self.
Initially, I explored this interest within the context of an eclectic community health clinical practice in several Canadian centres. After 15 years of experience, my creativity in this area expanded to include teaching and research as a tenured academic at the University of Toronto in the nursing faculty. Embedded in my background has been an appreciation of experience lived within a context: gender, age, racial, cultural and historical, in conjunction with the intrapsychic.
My curiosity deepened about our subjective experience, both conscious and unconscious, and how it influences and is altered through relationship. Currently, my interest is focussed in contemporary interpersonal and relational psychoanalytic perspectives, particularly the work at the William Alanson White Institute, New York and the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, which includes ego psychology, interpersonal psychoanalysis and the relational orientation.
A generalist by nature, I am drawn to the lively dialogue exemplified in journals such as Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Dialogues, where ambiguity is welcome, and one can seriously entertain various theoretical viewpoints. For myself, it is essential to maintain access to multiple perspectives, which can be drawn upon when one is with the immediate experience of both the client and the therapist. Who you are, who I am, and how we can meet each other at this moment, remains the essential focus.
I have studied at the University of Manitoba (B.N.), the University of Toronto (M.Sc.N) and the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy (D.C.T.P.). Currently, I am in private practice, and I teach at CTP.