MEMBERS OF THE BOARD
Kenneth Gergen, Ph.D is Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. He has been a major influence in social psychology since his and P. Davies's 1967 book on The Self. His role since then has been as an increasingly penetrating and respected critic of psychological practice. He has written 12 books including the 1991 award-winning The Saturated Self. Among his more recent books are Therapy as Social Construction (co-edited with S. McNamee), 1992; Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction, 1994; the 2nd Edition of Toward Transformation in Social Knowledge; and An Invitation to Social Construction.
Loren R Mosher, MD,
(1933 – 2004)
held for over a decade a central position in American psychiatric
research. He was the first Chief of the Center for Studies of
Schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health, 1969-1980. He
founded the Schizophrenia Bulletin and
for ten years, he was its Editor-in-Chief. He led the Soteria Project.
The Soteria research demonstrated that there is a better way: A better way to treat schizophrenia and other psychoses that destroy the lives of so many young people. The Soteria research showed that the prevalent excessive destructive psychiatric drugging of all these young people is a huge and tragic mistake. The psychiatric establishment was offended. Prestige and Money won. Truth and Love lost. The success! of Soteria was the reason that Dr Mosher was forced to leave his key position in American psychiatry. Dr Mosher was Director of Soteria Associates, San Diego, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego.
Alvin R. Mahrer Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of the school of Psychology, University of Ottawa. He is the author of 13 books and approximately 300 other publications. In addition to the Distinguished Psychologist Award, Dr Mahrer is one of four recipients of the first "Living Legends in Psychotherapy" award both bestowed by the American Psychological Association's Division of Psychotherapy.
Dr. Mahrer has developed Experiential Psychotherapy, a form of existential-humanistic therapy and is one of the main voices calling for psychotherapy integration. This is the subject of his 1989, now classic book – The Integration of Psychotherapies – A guide for Practicing Psychotherapists.” Two of his recent books are: The Complete Guide To Experiential Psychotherapy, 1996. (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) and Becoming The Person You Can Become: The Complete Guide To Self Transformation, 2002. (Bull Publications).
Thierry Melchior is a psychologist, Licensed in Philosophy (U.L.B.) and Licensed in Psycho-pedagogy (U.E.M.). He lives in Brussels, Belgium (European Union). He works in the Mental Health Service of the University of Brussels and in private practice in Brussels. After having worked in a psychoanalytical framework, he moved to other approaches, in the middle of the eighties, particularly Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and Brief Psychotherapy. He has been one of the founding members of the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Belgium, then of the Milton Erickson Institute of the North of France (in Lille). He was the founding president of the Belgian Society of Hypnosis (French-speaking).
He provides workshops, training and seminars in Hypnotherapy and Brief Therapy in Belgium and other countries. He has authored many papers dealing with hypnosis and brief therapy (some on them are available online) and the book Créer le réel, hypnose et thérapie, ֹeditions du Seuil, 1998.
Michael
Shernoff, MSW, CSW, ACSW, Diplomate in
Clinical Social Work. (March 31, 1951--June 17, 2008) was an openly gay
psychotherapist who specialized in serving the mental health needs of
gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and was author of several influential
publications on the topics of HIV/AIDS prevention and the mental health
concerns of gay men. Shernoff was born in
Queens, New York, on March 31, 1951. He attended New York City schools.
He graduated from the Harpur College at Binghamton University and in
1977 received a master’s degree in social work from the School of
Social Welfare of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
As a licensed clinical social worker, he offered outpatient mental
health services in Chelsea in New York City. He also taught at Hunter
College from 1991 to 2001, and from 2002 until his retirement in 2006
he served on the faculty of the Columbia University School of Social
Work. From 1997 until 2004 he was the online mental health expert for
the HIV/AIDS website TheBody.com.
He was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1982, but lived free of AIDS
symptoms. At the time of his death from pancreatic cancer in Manhattan
in June 2008, his brother Jeffrey Shernoff told The New York Times that
he found it ironic that after years of living with HIV infection, "He
died of pancreatic cancer, which may not even be related."
Uri Wernik Psy.D, the founder of
Transtherapy,
is a senior clinical and medical psychologist and certified sex
therapist. He is in private practice in Jerusalem, Israel. His work
experience includes directing the Misgav Ladach Hospital Sex Therapy
Clinic; heading a unit for autistic adolescents in a psychiatric
hospital; staff and student psychologist in the Bezalel Academy of Arts
and Design and group leader for bereaved parents of fallen soldiers.
Dr. Wernik is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (M.A.) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Psy.D). He is a founding member and former chairman of The Israeli Society of Sex Therapy. His latest book is Chance Action Therapy: The Playful Way of Changing. He is the author of seven books in Hebrew, among them I Qohelet (Ecclesiastes): Psychologist Philosopher Poet. He has published articles in professional journals on sexuality, psychology of religion and creativity.
Linda J.
Young, Ph.D. In 1978, I received my
Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University and went on to receive my
Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan.
After this, I became interested in working psychoanalytically with
individuals diagnosed as severely disturbed and obtained my post
doctoral fellowship training at the Detroit Psychiatric Hospital where
I subsequently went on to become a staff member. At the Detroit
Psychiatric Institute, (DPI) I worked primarily on the inpatient ward
where I also taught and supervised psychology interns. It was at DPI
where I began to seriously appreciate the incompatibility between
working to understand the inner mind of the individual and at the same
time forcing that understanding into a medical model in which the
individual would be diagnosed, required to take psychotropic medication
and hospitalized against his/her will. An article I wrote
describing these incompatibilities – Petitioning for Involuntary
hospitalization and the Involuntary Petitioning of Psychoanalysis - can
be found at
http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/ .In
1995 I became a founding member of the Academy for the Study
of the Psychoanalytic Arts, an
organization dedicated to redefining psychoanalysis as a discipline and
way of thinking about people and working with them, that existed
outside of a medical model.