School News

Chicago’s stunning Oriental Theatre filled to capacity October 23 as the Adler School community, family and friends came together to celebrate Commencement 2011 — and the accomplishments of the newest graduating class of socially responsible practitioners.

Adler School President Raymond E. Crossman, Ph.D., conferred the degrees to 154 Master of Arts graduates and 37 Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology graduates participating in Commencement. Joining Dr. Crossman in the ceremonies were Martha Casazza, Ed.D; Vice President of Academic Affairs; Board of Trustees members; and Adler School faculty who presented the graduates with their new academic hoods.

Giving the student address to fellow graduates was Marni B. Rosen, who graduated with her Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology degree and concurrently earned a Master of Arts degree in Counseling Psychology: Art Therapy, as well as her certificate in Advanced Adlerian Psychotherapy.

Rosen is a practicing art therapist and post-doctorate psychotherapist at the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, Connecticut. There, she specializes in trauma-informed psychotherapy and creative arts therapies with adult and child survivors of physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, and severe neglect.  She also is a research staff member with Yale University’s Holocaust Trauma Project, and a community lecturer on parenting children with trauma histories for the Jewish Community Center of New Haven and the Jewish Family Services of New Haven.   She continues to be an active artist, Adlerian, and writer with her recent art exhibition “Repairing the Shattered Pieces,” lecture presentation at the International Association for Individual Psychology in Vienna, Austria, and publication in The Arts in Psychotherapy.

“Each decade represents a change and shift in culture, and we are the Generation of Social Change,” Rosen told her fellow graduates. “We have been given the tools for individual change and more importantly the vision and mission for societal change. Together we make a collective, a force that can function as a catalyst for future social action movements.”

Click here to read Marni Rosen’s address: “I, the Individual: We, the Collective”

Also speaking at Commencement was NPR national correspondent and accomplished author Margot Adler, the granddaughter of community psychologist Alfred Adler whose work inspired the founding of the Adler School. As an NPR correspondent, she reports regularly on mainstay programs such as “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition,” and “Weekend Edition.”  Her reports have documented confrontation between radicals and the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, N.C., the work of AIDS counselors in San Francisco, the lives of homeless people living in subways, investigations into the state of the middle class, and an account on the last remaining hospital in America treating leprosy.

In addition to addressing the graduates, Margot Adler received an honorary degree from the Adler School for her work in promoting social justice and change. 

“This signature phrase of Adlerian psychology, gemeinschaftsgefühl, is translated as ‘social interest,’” Adler told the graduates. “And what does it mean, if not to help create a world, person by person, that is more human, more social, less fearful, less fearful of difference, of foreigners, of those who might take our jobs, less dogmatic, more courageous, more caring, more flexible, more able to deal with multiplicity and chaos and diversity, more empathetic than what we see around us now? 

“To figure that out, to help people become glass half-full people, rather than glass half-empty people, you may have to ask questions that go beyond the available answers.”

Click here to read Margot Adler’s address.

About the Adler School of Professional Psychology

The Adler School of Professional Psychology has provided quality education through a Scholar/Practitioner model for more than 50 years. The School’s mission is to train socially responsible graduates who continue the visionary work of Alfred Adler throughout the world. The Adler School offers 13 graduate-level programs enrolling more than 1,000 students at its campuses in Chicago and Vancouver, British Columbia, and through Adler Online.

Contact:
Kim McCullough
Director of Communications
Adler School of Professional Psychology
312-662-4124 or kmccullough@adler.edu