Mary Watkins

Mary Watkins, trained as a developmental and clinical psychologist, began her writing career taking up issues of the imagination (Waking Dreams and Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues). When she encountered the work of Brazilian pedagogist Paulo Freire, she began to immerse herself in liberation psychology. Collaborating with Helene Shulman, she co-authored Toward Psychologies of Liberation. Meanwhile as a mother of three adopted daughters and working as a therapist of young children, she studied how adoptive parents and young adoptees talk about adoption, and how young children understand what “adoption” means. She collaborated with psychoanalyst Susan Fisher, also an adoptive mother in writing Talking with Young Children About Adoption. Beginning in 2002, Watkins turned her attention to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the less literal borders in our towns and cities between citizen and non-citizen neighbors. In Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border, Watkins and phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey, her husband, grapple with the racism and xenophobia that plague these borders, as they gather prefigurative examples of how we could live borders in a much more vibrant and compassionate way. A concern with creating horizontal, dialogical relationships that are mutual and caring runs throughout all her work, and is the force that fuels her latest contribution Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons. Mary Watkins is chair of the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program, a founding co-chair of its Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies Specialization, and Coordinator of Community and Ecological Fieldwork at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, CA. mary-watkins.net has some Spanish and Portuguese translations of her work