Virginia Barry MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in full-time private practice in Chicago. She has served on the Institute’s faculty since 1991 and has taught many clinical and theoretical courses to psychiatric residents and psychoanalytic candidates including a course entitled “Mind & Brain” which introduces candidates to areas of neuroscience and cognitive science that have relevance for clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. She is especially interested in thinking about the biology of meaning, the development of language from gesture, the isomorphism between the hierarchical organization of the brain and that of the mind and the alterations of agency and motivation during the course of a psychoanalysis. She is the author of Scratch and Sniff Proust, a book that integrates psychoanalysis, art, neuroscience and literature while allowing the reader to sample the scents that motivated Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time.
Education:
Dr. Barry completed her medical degree at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and her residency in psychiatry at Michael Reese Hospital.
