PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY
Geraldine
Fogarty, Ph.D., FIPA; Psychotherapist; Psychoanalyst; Lecturer,
Professional Title
"Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist"
Toronto , Ontario M6R 1Z9, Canada
I have worked in private practice as a psychotherapist for twenty-eight
years and have practiced psychoanalysis for the past eight years. I love my
work and feel privileged to be able to help the people who come to see me. I
hold a Ph.D. in the Psychology of Religion (Psychoanalysis) from the University
of Toronto and am a graduate of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis (TIP),
where I am now on faculty, teaching courses such as “Dreams,” “Ethics of
Clinical Practice,” “Psychoanalytic Listening,” and “Gender and Sexuality in
Psychoanalysis.” I have given presentations to the Ontario Society of
Psychotherapists, the European Association of Psychotherapists, and have
lectured on C.G. Jung’s Analytic Psychology in Dublin, Ireland.
I am a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, a Fellow of the
International Psychoanalytic Association, a member of the Curriculum Committee
for the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, a member of the Executive
Committee of the Advanced Program for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and an
accredited member of the Irish Association for Humanistic and Integrative
Psychotherapy and the Irish Council for Psychotherapy. I am an Honorary Member
of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists, and, instrumental to its formation,
served as the Society’s first and founding President.
I spent my childhood in Ireland
and immigrated to Canada at age twelve. The subjective experience of being an
immigrant has allowed me to appreciate how cultural and emotional differences
underpin fundamental understandings of the self and of relationships with
others. Throughout my professional life, a deep commitment to the prospect that
the meaningful exploration of conscious and unconscious ways of knowing can
lead to psychic change and thereto to healing, growth, and fulfillment has
characterized my work with people.
Professional History
For the first eighteen years of my professional life, I taught
elementary school for the Etobicoke Board of Education, primarily teaching
Language Arts and History to gifted adolescents in the Special Education
Program. During that time, I developed a particular interest in the fostering
of creativity and in addressing the challenges of ‘feeling different’ that
gifted students often face in childhood and adolescence. This included giving presentations
to teachers on designing and modifying programs for the gifted student that
focussed on optimal classroom conditions for learning.
Concurrently, I completed an undergraduate degree in English Literature
at York University, followed by a Masters Degree in the Psychology of Religion
(Psychoanalysis) at the University of Toronto (1992), with a thesis entitled King Lear as an Embodiment of the Dark Side
of Jung’s Individuation Process. My Ph.D., completed in 2009, is a cross-disciplinary
dissertation in Early Irish Literature and Psychoanalysis, entitled Madness and Transformation in Early Irish
Literature: A Psychoanalytic Perspective.
Throughout the 1980’s I studied with Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, and
incorporated a Jungian analysis with an apprenticeship-training in
psychotherapy. This training included theoretical material, dream analysis,
supervision, and participation in a Body-Mind Group for Psychotherapists.”
Between 1985 and 2000, I investigated a variety of different
psychotherapeutic modalities and approaches, including Bioenergetics abreactive
technique, British Object Relations, and Past Life Therapy, a process involving
Jungian interpretation of dissociative states that take the form of past life
memories and become available through archetypal imagery, body memory and
abreaction.
I have presented papers on the theories of Jung and on the subject of
transference and countertransference: “Transference and Countertransference
Resistance,” at the Annual Meeting of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists,
Toronto, Ontario (1996); “What is Jungian Psychotherapy?” at the AGM of the
Ontario Society of Psychotherapists, (1999); and “Working with Distorted Realms
in Ordinary People in Long-term, Depth Psychotherapy,” at the Annual meeting of
the European Association of Psychotherapy, Dublin, Ireland (2000).
I was one of ten psychotherapists who in 1989 formed the Steering
Committee of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists and founded Ontario’s
first professional association of psychotherapists in private practice. The
Ontario Society of Psychotherapists (OSP) was instrumental in establishing a
code of ethics, providing standards of qualifications and contributing to the
development of a professional identity for theoretically divergent individual psychotherapists.
Seeking to extend my theoretical and clinical knowledge of contemporary
psychoanalytic theory, I enrolled in the psychoanalytic training program at the
Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis in 2004. My training as a psychoanalyst was
concurrent with my doctoral studies providing the opportunity to bring together
the theories of diverse modalities in clinically useful psychotherapists in
private practice.
Since then, I have given papers that reflect my increasing appreciation
of the importance of the changing inner states of the psychotherapist’s / psychoanalyst’s
mind in the clinical setting. In 2005 I chaired a panel discussion on
countertransference resistance, “Sexual Fantasies Behind the Couch” at the
Annual Meeting of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society in Toronto, and gave a
paper “Ethics and Psychoanalysis: Towards an Ethics of Liminal Subjectivity,”
at the Literature and Psychoanalysis Symposium held at the University of
Toronto, 2010.
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