Marcia Johnston Wood, PhD
Portland – Retired March 2022

I retired at the end of March 2022 from private practice in Portland. My career started in New York. After my doctorate, and a clinical internship at Yale University School of Medicine, I did a 2-year Fellowship at The New York Hospital / Cornell Medical Center as a therapist on the long-term inpatient Borderline unit (Kernberg’s old unit) and doing research on Personality disorders. From there I worked for the City Hospital System of NY for a couple of years, which was like going from having all the resources to none of the resources but was a great learning experience. I worked on an adult inpatient unit and was also on the faculty of Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, supervising and teaching interns and residents. I also had a small private practice in the evenings.

After having our first child, I shifted to doing only private practice and we moved to Portland and never looked back. My career since 1994 has been in private practice in Portland with adults, largely from a psychodynamic point of view. As a balance to the potential isolation of private practice, I served for many years doing volunteer work for OPA. I was on the Ethics Committee for 5 years and chaired that in my 5^th year. I was President of OPA, and following that 3-year sequence, was on the Colleague Assistance Committee, which later became the Confidential Peer Support Committee. I chaired that committee for the last 6 years, until this past December. The work for OPA was so rewarding!

The first 2 years of COVID, I largely worked remotely from our house on San Juan Island, which was a haven in which to do that. In retirement I intend to spend perhaps 80% of my time on San Juan and the rest in Portland but will include a fair amount of travel. My efforts for non-profit organizations have shifted to Portland Literary Arts where I serve on three committees and have also just joined the Board. Literature has been a passion my whole life and I never regretted having been an English major at Williams College rather than concentrating on psychology at that stage. Other major interests and hobbies in which I have engaged throughout my life, and will continue in retirement, include competitive squash, pickleball, designing and making stained glass windows, and birding.

In the months since retiring, it has felt liberating and relaxing not to set a morning alarm, to do Wordle, and read the NY Times before ever getting out of bed, although the first week of retirement I dreamed that I was in a group of psychologists who informed me that even in retirement I had to be in supervision twice a week. Luckily, I woke up