Kathy Knowlton, PhD
ABS Immediate Past President
2021 - 2023

Kathy likes to claim her first name, Edith, because it makes her feel closer to Enid (Balint), but she’s always gone by the middle one, Katherine. Raised on the coast of Maine, she followed her husband to Seattle after graduate school and quickly decided he’d had a great idea about where to live. Her professional work revolved for more than 35 years around a private practice in long-term individual psychotherapy in that city. Her Balint life began in ’95 when she took over pro bono leadership of a residents’ group from a friend who was moving. Then she discovered Intensives (she considers herself a representative of the ABS subset who led first and then learned how!), attended one a year for ages and eventually did credentialing under the supervision of Ann Sinclair.

Kathy has done every job she could identify with the ABS: hosting Intensives, serving as faculty, supervising, doing stints as Coordinator of Intensives, Secretary, and President. She considers Balint work exquisitely adaptable to whatever members need to learn: words for feelings; insights about countertransference; tolerance of colleagues; self-forgiveness; acceptance of human limits. As such she believes that doing it improves the world. It has certainly, happily improved her and enriched her life.