We would like to honor our colleague and one of the early members of VPSG from its inaugural days.
Dr. Douglas Betts passed away March 30th, 2023, from complications associated with COVID. Dr Betts was an Assistant Professor in the UVM Department of Psychiatry for many years and taught residents as a psychotherapy supervisor and Balint Group leader. He served as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, having completed his Bachelors at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, and his M.D. At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He went on to internship and residency in Canada before coming to the states and settling in Burlington in the 1980s. Douglas and his wife, Carol, also held a monthly analytic study group at their home on South Prospect Street. Bill Butler, Thomas Gazda, Bruce Gibbard, and Sharon Williams Dennett (who all trained in Montreal at the Quebec English Canadian Institute and Society) along with Bert Francke who trained at the William Allison White in NYC, were among those few analysts in Vermont who worked together to teach small psychoanalytic study groups in the community. This was all prior to forming VPSG as a local IPA training opportunity in the late 2009. When VPSG formed, Douglas was one of its early members where he joined in teaching the first class, attended conferences, and famously presented to our then members a wonderful talk on Salvador Dahli. His wide-ranging psychoanalytic interests and his dedication to psychiatry and psychoanalysis were a part of his near boundless energy and enthusiasm. Those of us who learned from Dr. Betts as a supervisor, colleague, enthusiastic student of psychoanalysis and knew him as a dedicated psychoanalyst, working with adults, children and families will miss him and his enthusiasm for all things therapeutic and psychoanalytic. We honor what he brought to the community writ large and to VPSG in its early days. We are humble in the face of his aging and passing and deeply grateful for his contributions. Sharon Williams Dennett |
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Douglas H. Betts
1934-2023 We find a place for what we lose The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dali, 1931 |