Judy Schavrien
- Ph.D., University of Chicago, Psychology History and Systems (Committee on Social Thought), 1973
- University of Chicago, M.A., same, 1971
- University of Chicago, B.A., General Studies in the Humanities, 1966
Judy is formerly an ITP Board Member and Chair of the Global Ph.D. Program, where she is now Associate Professor. Prior to joining the Institute, Judy helped found the first two graduate degrees in the world in Women's Spirituality at California Institute of Integral Studies, receiving for that a Founding Mothers award; students from that original doctoral degree brought to ITP its own thriving Women's Spirituality Masters.
In her capacity as a clinician, she served as an audience consultant to the Oprah Winfrey show; she also appeared in the Winfrey show "Lesbian Couples." She worked with Eugene Gendlin as a Focusing Trainer and, as Senior Staff, team-ran the Carl Rogers clinic in Chicago. She was the first “out” gay person elected to Association of Humanistic Psychology and served there on the Executive Committee of the Board. She is a long-time feminist and LGBTQ activist and also served on the Board of GAYLESTA (LGBTQ therapists of the Bay Area).
Judy, who had been treating post-trauma stress in others, contracted it after a mugging in which she was shot in the face. Her healing journey led to residence in India and the Far East, including pursuant years of practice with the Dzogchen master, Sogyal Rinpoche, known as the laughing lama.
In her research, she reconnects transpersonal psychology to its roots in world literature. Situated in the Global Online program, she offers world perspective: Her book, What Rhymes with Cancer, focuses on Dutch attitudes toward war and illness, and, in the three anthologies that include her work, she explores classical Greek psychospiritual themes as well as Tibetan Buddhist perspectives. Her present book in progress, most of it now published as articles, spans Late Vision in Western Culture: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ingmar Bergman. For these three figures, she correlates late-in-life adjustments in vision with the remedies for disillusionment taken by cultures past their apogee. Such remedies often unite a fragmented society through a vision that places urban life in a wider context of natural cycles— mystical, rebalancing, reasserting the role of feminine energies.
She is a prize-winning theorist and creative artist, with 16 national and international prizes including an award for Pioneering in Feminist Curriculum and Teaching from the Association of Women in Psychology. Her web galleries are at http://www.judys.imagekind.com
