Chicago | Director of Master’s Counseling Training | Center for Adlerian Practice and Scholarship
Dr. Paul Fitzgerald first became involved with the Chicago Adlerian community while working as a mental health worker and discharge planner at St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago from 1976 to 1986. Bernard Shulman, M.D. was the Medical Director of the psychiatry department at St. Joseph. While at St. Joseph, Dr. Fitzgerald became familiar with the work of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs along with Dr. Shulman’s use of the Therapeutic Community concepts of Maxwell Jones, in the inpatient milieu setting. In the process, he came to know Bina Rosenberg, M.D., Adaline Starr, Dorothy Peven, Sadie “Tee” Dreikurs, and other local Adlerian practitioners and teachers who worked with Dr. Shulman. Dr. Fitzgerald taught a basic Adlerian Psychology in-service to each of the groups of nursing students who rotated through the psychiatry service at St. Joseph. He also led the adolescent inpatient therapy group at St. Joseph for a number of years.
In 1979, Dr. Fitzgerald enrolled in the M.A. in Counseling Psychology program at what was then the Alfred Adler Institute. He completed his Master’s practicum at the Dreikurs Psychological Services Center and at St. Joseph Hospital’s Community Mental Health Center. His practicum supervisors included Sherwood Perman and Seymour Schneider. His instructors at the Adler Institute also included Robert Powers and Jane Griffith, Ronald Forgus, and Leo Lobl; and his training therapy was with Dr. Bina Rosenberg. He learned Life Style assessment from Dr. Shulman, using Shulman’s and Mosak’s adaptation of Rudolf Dreikurs’ Life Style Assessment format, which was still in use at St. Joseph’s. He received his Master’s degree in 1986, and left St. Joseph to work in long-term residential care and community mental health settings, before becoming a youth and family crisis worker and employee assistance counselor with the Village of Orland Park in 1989. In 1991, Dr. Fitzgerald returned to the Adler School of Professional Psychology to work on the relatively new Doctor of Psychology degree.
In the Psy.D. Program, Dr. Fitzgeraldl’s classmates included Dr. Mark Bilkey, and his instructors included Jon Carlson and Mark Stone. He completed the Certificate in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy taught by Arthur Freeman. This program combined Adlerian psychology with Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy into an evidence-based form of treatment that remained true to Adlerian principles.
Following his graduation in 1997, Dr. Fitzgerald worked at Grand Prairie Services in Flossmoor, Illinois, and then with several Employee Assistance programs including the Federal Occupational Health program and Perspectives EAP, where he became the clinical director. He has also been active in the local chapter of the Employee Assistance Professionals Association and continues to serve as Secretary of the chapter.
In 2008, after supervising Adler students on their practicum placements at Perspectives, Dr. Fitzgerald returned to the Adler School of Professional Psychology as an adjunct faculty member in the Master of Arts in Counseling and Organizational Psychology program. He became a full-time faculty member in that program in 2009, and became Director of Master’s Training in 2010. He continues as Director of Training while teaching courses in a number of programs (including a number of the Adlerian psychology courses) and serving as one of the faculty advisory members of the Center for Adlerian Study and Research.
Dr. Fitzgerald currently maintains a private practice in Chicago and Hinsdale, Illinois, where he works with individual, couples, and families, using Adlerian and cognitive-behavioral approaches. He is also a qualified Substance Abuse Professional and works closely with a number of employee assistance programs providing workplace services and substance abuse assessments. His areas of interest include organizational applications of Adlerian psychology, Adlerian psychology as applied to substance use disorders, and Adlerian family and couple counseling. He is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, as well as a Certified Employee Assistance Professional.