Kathy Knowlton
Emerita Councilor
2021 - present

Being nominated for Emeritus means there will be a formal nomination that makes you sound too effective for words. But then you get to write your own history to reveal some of what happened behind the scenes.

My best friend came to me in 1995 and announced that she was moving to Washington, D.C. to write healthcare legislation, so I would have to take over her pro bono facilitation of the R3’s Balint group at the University of Washington Family Medicine Residency. This statement struck me as utterly absurd. Why would someone voluntarily move to DC? What were R3’s anyway? And why would a psychoanalytic psychotherapist like me be interested in whatever a Balint group might be?

Within a couple of years I had attended the first of many yearly Intensives, and had the modal experience of utter mortification at how wrong I was doing it and complete delight over finding so many people of like mind. In those early years the big lesson, aside from how to lead a group, was to stop going it alone. I had an individual private practice, drove to the residency to lead by myself and almost never met another faculty member. I wanted to offer a Balint workshop to the state’s family practitioners, so I guessed I would just go ahead and do it by myself.  Nobody signed up.
Notice that I did not say this taught me humility or pared my ambition down to size. My dreams of world peace through empathy burned ever bright, though I began to think progress might require a band of believers, not a lone devotee. When Robbie Sherman, MD, hired me to lead her medical practice’s private Balint group and effectively co-lead the first session, I knew I had a golden ally. Within a couple of years we had offered a Balint weekend in Seattle, importing credentialed leaders from Portland.

Robbie turned to me at another intensive we attended after that and said, I’m going to get credentialed. Do you want to do it with me? So even credentialing, which might have happened solo, was a joint venture.

Another major lesson was trust the group. As coordinator of the intensives committee, I felt I had found the perfect job. President Albert Lichtenstein, fishing for nominees for an upcoming ABS election, asked me to serve as Secretary. He probably wasn’t expecting the bad attitude and the sour, peevish, slow assent. I could see it would work for the Society, but that just meant I would do it, not that I had to like it! Of course it turned out to be a great role made all the more interesting and rewarding by its unexpected ‘burdens’, such as administering the nascent website and developing its next iteration.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Balint Society in my life as a source of meaning and growth and as a professional home that has provided comfort and challenge.  I was extraordinarily lucky that my first Council was the final one which included one of the founders, Clive Brock, and at the other end of things I got to be one of the people constructing the job for our wonderful first administrator Shantel Beckers.

There are so many people I will always love who have come into my life through this work. And the work itself remains inspiring to me. I love it and the people who are attracted to it and its remarkable ability to connect us as we do it together.

For a narrative of Dr. Knowlton's work with the ABS, consult her Emerita Nomination.