Margaret Yard, PhD, APRN, BC
Dr. Margaret Yard is an Asst. Professor, Lehman College, CUNY, Faculty, Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, Alumni Program in International Trauma Studies, Columbia University, Alumni Adult Psychoanalytic Program and Analytic Group Therapy Programs, Post Graduate Center for Mental Health, Past President Post-Graduate Psychoanalytic Society, Co-Chair Educational and Training Programs, Faculty for Psychoanalytic Training, Object Relations Institute and Washington Square Institute. She is a faculty and training supervisor for Chinese American Psychoanalytic Association (CAPA) and teaches psychoanalysis in Beijing and Singapore. She is a Chair of the Province Review Board for Dominican Fathers and Brothers of the Affirming and Protecting Children and Young People Program as well as consultant for contemplative monastic communities for nuns in the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church.
In private practice in psychoanalysis, group practice, family practice, trauma and geriatrics, she was first responder on 9/11 at World Trade Center working with the American Red Cross. In geriatrics, she was guest lecturer on “How to Speak with Alzheimer’s” with The New York State Alzheimer’s Association, working with experiential groups with spouses and caretakers of Alzheimer’s patients. She developed and taught a series: “Helping the Helpers” with secondary trauma or compassion fatigue experienced by professionals and volunteers who work with trauma victims.
Dr Yard is a member of the longstanding Death Seminar at Columbia University and teaches Loss, Grief, Death and Dying to undergraduates and graduate university programs for nurses, administrators, social work and sociology students.
She is a Foundation Member of the New York Zen Contemplative Care Program and is a death vigil participant for Visiting Nurse Service of New York (NYVNS).
Her most recent article is “Cyberlife and the Colonization of Intersubjectivity” is published in Winter, 2010, Psychoanalytic Psychology.
At Lehman College, CUNY, she teaches a course: Real world and Cyberspace Relationships.” She writes on the effects of science and technology on human intersubjectivity and relations, and the phenomenon of death from a Humanist and contemplative perspective. She is currently working on an article entitled “The Role of Trauma in Religious Belief, a chapter “Inequality in Care,” and a book entitled “VITALITY.”
Recent presentations was at the Pulse of Death Now Conference at Columbia University include “Inequality in Death” 2010, and in 2008, “De-Civilization as response to Cultures of Death and Societal Trauma in the Second Millennium.”
Dr Yard is a published poet and lyricist. Her poetry may be found in “History of Silence”, 1998, and in 2010, “Death Steps” describes human struggle with illness from a social and psychoanalytical viewpoint.
She has authored book and lyrics on five operas written with composer Michael Sahl; these operas are produced and performed in New York City: “ Blood Ferry” (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “John Grace Ranter” (directed by Tom O’Horgan at Theater for the New City); “Sally Ann-Home Sweet Home” (was performed at Greenwich House and the Chelsea Theater Festival, Summer, 2005); “Katrina; Voices of the Lost” (its premiere was presented on April 24th, 2007 at the Spring Festival of the New York Arts Ensemble in Soho, and then – in New Orleans on this past anniversary of Hurricane Katrina). On November 13th, 2010, the premier of “Legacy: Our Time” was performed at the Greenwich House Music Institute. Legacy speaks of the terrible beauty and awful paradox of the 60’s- the dream of justice and love, and the reality of empire and violence. Her next piece in 2011 is entitled “The Death Class”.