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Marike Finlay de Monchy

Marike Finlay de Monchy has relinquished a twenty-year university teaching career in the humanities at McGill and abroad in order to devote her time and energies to creative writing, environmental activism, and sailing. A practicing psychoanalyst for fifteen years, she is convinced that "making something" is sometimes the only "remedy" for life's traumas and tragedies. She specialized in working with young adults striving to both live and work creatively. The key to this, she believes, is to set people to see a value first and foremost in expressing themselves close to the bone and only later to worry about making it public.

Marike Finlay de Monchy is the director and owner of Quoddy's Run, a small press and cultural center located on Nova Scotia's under-developed Eastern Shore. She is the recipient of a Canada Council grant for a psychoanalytic short story collection called The Killing Ear. Her previous publications consist of numerous scholarly works in the fields of literary criticism, epistemology, communications, policy studies, and psychoanalysis. Currently she is writing with Karin Cope a series of loss for the Herald on their sailing voyage from San Diego to Panama. Collected, they will make a book.

Dr. Finlay de Monchy holds a PhD. in Comparative Literature from L'Université de Montréal and an MSc. in Psychiatry from cGill, as well as being a certified member of the International and Canadian Psychoanalytic Associations. In the last two decades, she has taught in univeristies in Canada, South America and Europe, was Chair of the Comparative Literature department at McGill, and has been a practicing psychoanalyst. She is an avid blue-water sailor, and has skippered many voyages in the Great Lakes, as well as in the North Atlantic. Prior to coming to the Maritimes, for ten years in Quebec, she ran a 150-acre organic farm, and remains passionately interested and involved in environmental concerns. Currently, she is the Arts and Culture Shadow Cabinet Critic for The Green Party of Canada.

Marike has guest edited a special issue of The Canada Journal of Psychoanalyses called Poesis and Psychoanalysis. A first in Canada, the issue practices, performs and theorizes the essential role played by arts of making for both patient and analyst. Short stories, Socratic dialogues, performance photo stories, drawing narratives, contemporary neuroscience all give fiction to the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis as objective science, demonstrating rather that it is a creative art from both sides of the couch. Dr. Finlay de Monchy is practicing psychoanalyst in Halifax.