Luminary: Kaethe Weingarten

Luminary: Kaethe Weingarten

Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., (pronounced Kay-tah), founded and directs the Witnessing Project. She is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, where she has been on the faculty since 1981. She founded and directs the Program in Family, Trauma and Resilience: Integrating Biology, Psychology, Family, and Community Perspectives. She co-developed and taught in the Program in Narrative Therapies at the Family Institute of Cambridge and has supervised at the Victims of Violence Program, based at Cambridge Health Alliance. She is a member of the Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative and Chair of the Human Rights Committee of the American Family Therapy Academy.

Her professional activities include teaching nationally and in Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe and New Zealand; service on the editorial boards of five journals; and writing (six authored or edited books; over 25 articles in peer-reviewed journals; and many book chapters.

She is a Fellow of the Divisions of Family Psychology and the Psychology of Women of the American Psychological Association, from whom she received the 1994 award for Psychotherapy with Women. In 2002 she was awarded the highest honor of the American Family Therapy Academy, the award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Theory and Practice.

Dr. Weingarten’s current work focuses on the development and dissemination of a witnessing model to ameliorate the effects of violence following domestic, inter-ethnic, racial, political and other forms of conflict. She has taught this model to hundreds of professionals and used the model in consultation with individuals, couples, families and organizations, as well as with traumatized populations in Kosovo and South Africa.