Heidi M. Levitt
Associate Professor, Psychology
University of Memphis, United States

Heidi M. Levitt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis and the Director of the Clinical Psychology program. After receiving her PhD from York University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Florida. Her research focuses upon processes of personal change and identity development across three areas of investigation: gender identities, domestic violence, and psychotherapy. Her work on psychotherapy has studied processes including silence, curiosity, narrative, and wisdom. She is interested in exploring wisdom as it is shaped by professional activities, such as psychotherapy, as well as multidisciplinary professional structures and identities. She has expertise in conducting and publishing qualitative research, teaches qualitative research methods courses at the graduate level, and serves on the editorial boards of Psychotherapy Research, The Humanistic Psychologist, and Counseling and Psychotherapy Research. In 2005, she was awarded an Early Career Research Award from The University of Memphis and, in 2006, the Carmi Harari Early Career Research Award by Division 32 [Humanistic Psychology] of the American Psychological Association. Her research has been funded by granting agencies such as Le Bonheur Health Systems and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Principles Toward the Development of Professional Wisdom
As wisdom can be understood as a deeper understanding of reality, its identification is based within an ontological position of what is real, and an epistemological position on how knowledge can be developed (e.g., Robinson, 1990).  As these positions shift across eras, the meaning of wisdom can change. Where in pre-modernity the enactment of wisdom may have fallen to religious and community leaders, the shepherds in the contemporary quest for wisdom often fall within secular fields separated from one another (e.g., Giddens, 1990). This project studies the development and functioning of professional wisdom within two professional groups: (1) psychotherapists who offer wisdom on questions of self-development via psychotherapy; and (2) judges who offer wisdom via rulings on how people should interact via hearing cases and making decisions. Professionals who are identified as exemplifying wisdom within these two professional practices will be interviewed.  The interviews will be analyzed in two sets using grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).  A hierarchical model of wisdom will be developed for each profession. By applying a hermeneutic analysis to these two hierarchies, principles then will be developed to show not only how wisdom might be enacted and understood in similar ways across these professional groups, but why it also might adopt different forms at times.

Levitt has been working with her research team to collect nominations of wise professionals from across different forms of practice and perspective across the two professions. Different strategies have been used to reach different professional groups, including sending the call for nominations out to professional groups nationally and regionally, to minority professional organizations in large metropolitan areas, to faculty at universities and judicial colleges, and to journal editorial boards. She has trained three research assistants to process nominations and to create a nomination database. Over 100 nominations of “wise lawyers” and over 250 nominations of “wise psychologists” have been recorded thus far. The nomination database contains information on each nomination (nominators’ professional background, contact information, the basis for their nomination, and the definition of wisdom they used in making their nomination). Also, the database includes data on the nominees (types of law/psychotherapy practiced, and demographic information). The process of inviting and coordinating interviews has begun.

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