THE ECOTHERAPY INSTITUTE

Bill Petrie is a psychotherapist who spent most of his childhood in rural Swaziland, a small Southern African country which, at that time, was poorly developed. This meant for Bill that there was daily access to true wilderness and this extraordinary experience spurned a long-standing interest in the ways in which people benefit both personally and spiritually from intimate contact with nature.

Bill trained initially as a microbiologist and later went on to qualify as a Clinical Psychologist. His (1988) Master's Thesis was on a Jungian understanding of wilderness experience. He has since completed several psychotherapy trainings and trained as a vision quest guide with (the late) Steven Foster and Meredith Little in the USA. Steven and Meredith are widely regarded as being the 'grandparents' of the modern vision quest. In addition to this, Bill has undertaken an arduous training in an African shamanic tradition. He finds that all of these areas of interest have contributed to a rich understanding of nature, psychology and spirituality.

For the last ten years Bill has been working with people in nature and he has found this work to be deeply inspiring for all concerned.

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Graham Saayman, Ph.D. (University of London) was educated in South Africa, Canada, the United States and Britain. Trained as a family therapist at Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals, he has more than 30 years of experience as a clinical psychologist. As Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town (1974 -1989), his team researched the benefits of meditation and dream appreciation as an antidote to stress. His major clinical interests include the management of anxiety, depression, grief, stress, life transitions, spiritual emergence and the benefits of group process in wilderness retreats.

Interested in the evolutionary origins of the family system, in his early career he studied baboon social systems in the Limpopo Valley and made one of the first systematic studies of the social behaviour of dolphins and whales off the south-eastern Cape coast. His book, “Hunting with the Heart: A Vision Quest to Spiritual Emergence” highlights the survival value of spiritual generosity, captures the essence of a therapeutic paradigm with Nature at its core and connects the health of earth’s ecosystems to the art and science of healing.

He was elected an Honorary Member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology in 2001. Criteria include international recognition and original scholarly contributions to Jungian thought. 

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