by Gabrielle Bélanger Dumontier, D. Psy., Ph. D.

A proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child. For me, it helped to have a “village”, or more precisely the IAPSP community, to support the development of my professional self in the very beginning of my career.

In my first year as a young professional, I felt a need to find a professional community to break the loneliness of working in private practice as a psychologist. I found that in the Groupe d’Étude sur l’intersubjectivité, an IAPSP Institutional member in Montréal (Canada). Some members of that study group kindly told me about the existence of the IAPSP Early Career Professional (ECP) Award.

This is when I was welcomed in the IAPSP family as one of the 2019 ECP Award recipients. I felt so thrilled to meet great clinicians and authors in self psychology at the IAPSP Conference in Vancouver, those very same authors that I had been reading for years. I was always excited to receive the new issue of the Psychoanalysis, Self and Context Journal in my mailbox. The clinical vignettes and articles in the journal inspired me in my clinical work. Moreover, I was so lucky to be mentored by Dr. Carol Levin who really offered me a safe place to reflect on my work and helped me make sense of my experience as a novice therapist. The mentoring was really the most precious part of the scholarship.

I really appreciated that my mentor encouraged me after my year as an ECP awardee to continue my training in self psychology. She informed me about long-distance training, since there is no psychoanalytic institute in self psychology in the area where I live. I enrolled in the long-distance training program at IPSS, and then at TRISP the following year. Meanwhile I was elected on the IAPSP international council as a one of the representatives for Canada. I also became involved in the IAPSP Students and Candidates Committee, wishing for more young professionals to join and benefit from belonging to the IAPSP community. The benefits of being an ECP awardee thus extended way beyond that year of training. It helped me build a network in the self psychology community, to ameliorate my theoretical understanding of the approach, and to find my voice in clinical work.

I hope that this testimony of my experience will motivate some early career clinicians to apply for the scholarship and benefit from a great and transformative training experience.

I am eternally grateful for the generosity of all the people at IAPSP who made that experience possible. Special thanks to the people in the GEI in Montréal who informed me about the existence of the scholarship, Jean-François Bernard and Annette Richard, to Shaké Topalian and to all the people on the Early Career Professionals Committee at IAPSP, to the organizers of the IAPSP Conference in Vancouver in 2019, and finally to Carol Levin, my mentor during my year as an awardee.

Gabrielle Bélanger Dumontier, D. Psy., Ph. D.

Gabrielle Bélanger Dumontier is a psychologist, D.Psy./Ph. D., in private practice with adults in Montreal (Quebec) Canada since 2017. She is an elected member of the IAPSP International Council as one of the representatives for Canadian members and acts on the IAPSP Students and Candidates Committee. She is also a past member of the Board for the Groupe d’étude sur l’intersubjectivité, an IAPSP institutional member in Quebec (Canada). She was a recipient of the 2019 IAPSP’s ECP Award. She has since completed long-distance training in psychoanalytic self-psychology and intersubjectivity at IPSS and TRISP. In her clinical work, she has a special interest for themes related to exile, migration and transcultural issues.