Approach
Man is a sphinx crouching upon his own meaning.
Patrick F. Woodtli is a clinical psychologist and anthropologist, holds a doctorate in psychology from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and is a member of the Ordre des psychologues du Québec. In Montréal, he directs the Clinique de psychologie Mentana, where he practises and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology.
His training is threefold: philosophy, anthropology, clinical psychology. It took shape in layers, alongside a first professional life spent across several continents. An experience in international cooperation in Tanzania would later prove a turning point, leading him to a doctorate in clinical psychology, then to a practice carried out concurrently in private practice and in a hospital setting, notably in the outpatient psychiatry department of Hôpital Charles-Le-Moyne.
Of this path, anthropology has remained a way of seeing. No one suffers outside a world — a language, a culture, institutions, an era — and care must learn to hear what these worlds do to singular lives.
His practice follows a psychodynamic, predominantly integrative orientation, attentive to the quality of the therapeutic relationship, to processes of subjectivation, and to the transformations of our relationship to time, meaning and others. It draws in particular on contemporary psychoanalysis, phenomenology and certain relational and existential approaches, as well as on Gestalt object-relations psychotherapy (PGRO), in which he is training at the Centre d’intervention gestaltiste.
His doctoral work examines the developmental processes underlying certain identity vulnerabilities, particularly in personality disorders and in contexts of complex trauma.
His clinical work is guided by a sustained attention to what, in each person, seeks a form in which to be said, a rhythm in which to unfold, and a singular way of inhabiting one’s relation to others and to one’s own history.
Alongside this, he pursues a body of writing. In Montréal he founded Éditions L’Encre du Temps, a house devoted to the metamorphoses of experience.