Mary Watkins - Opening Doors in the Borderlands
Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Mad in America
4.7 • 212 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2020
⏱️ 53 minutes
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Summary
Mary Watkins is a psychologist at Pacifica Graduate Institute who focuses on reorienting psychology toward social justice and liberatory ends. She has a foundation in the depth psychologies of Carl Jung and James Hillman, as well as holistic approaches to community healing such as indigenous, liberation, and eco-psychologies. She has worked in a variety of settings, such as immigration detention centers, prisons, and marginalized communities, with the aim of social transformation beyond the individual.
Her research interests include a focus on the restorative power of dialogue, creative imagination, forced migration, adoption, and socioeconomic justice. In addition to numerous articles, she has published several books, such as Waking Dreams, Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Toward Psychologies of Liberation with Dr. Helene Shulman, Up Against the Wall: Re-imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border with Dr. Edward Casey, and most recently, Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Madden America Podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice. |
| 0:14.0 | Hello, and welcome to the Madden America podcast. I'm Micah Engle, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of West Georgia, and a research newswriter for the Madden America website. |
| 0:25.6 | Today I'm joined by Dr. Mary Watkins to talk about her background and her work at the forward edge of psychology. |
| 0:32.6 | Dr. Watkins is chair of the Depth Psychology Program and co-chair and professor in the Community, |
| 0:39.4 | Liberation, Indigenous, and Ecocsychologies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. |
| 0:45.8 | Dr. Watkins has a foundation in the Depth Psychologies of Carl Jung and James Hellman, as well as |
| 0:50.9 | holistic approaches to community healing such as liberation and eco-psychology. |
| 0:55.0 | Her research interests also include a focus on the restorative power of dialogue, |
| 1:00.0 | creative imagination, forced migration, adoption, socioeconomic justice, and Quaker studies. |
| 1:07.0 | In addition to numerous articles, she has published several books such as |
| 1:12.2 | waking dreams, invisible guests, the development of imaginal dialogues, towards |
| 1:17.6 | Psychologies of Liberation with Dr. Aline Shulman, up against the wall, reimagining the |
| 1:23.2 | US-Mexico border with Dr. Edward Casey, and most recently mutual accompaniment and the creation |
| 1:29.2 | of the commons. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today, Dr. Watkins. |
| 1:34.2 | Thank you, Micah. Thank you for the invitation. |
| 1:36.9 | All right, so let's jump right in here. So can you give a basic description of your interests |
| 1:42.1 | as a psychologist? You know, I began reading psychology |
| 1:46.4 | in my adolescence. I was mainly reading Freud and Bidelheim. And when I got to college, |
| 1:55.3 | I was stunned that the psychology that I was learning, that would have been in 1968, was completely different from what I thought psychology was going to be. |
| 2:09.2 | And, you know, I've been involved now with psychology for almost 50 years. |
| 2:13.1 | And I think I've had an abiding desire to reorient theory in psychology and to reorient practice. |
| 2:24.1 | And I had a very important mentor when I was in graduate school at Clark University named Bernie Kaplan. |
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