About Mary Baures


Mary Baures
Private Practice
 

Treating chronic illness, trauma, eating disorders, relationships,depression and anxiety

Accepts most insurance: Aetna, Blue Cross & Blue Shield MA, Cigna, Harvard/Pilgrim/Vanguard, HMO Blue, Mass Health (MA Behavioral Health Partnership), Medicare, Teamsters

Mary Baures is a writer and an artist who practices psychology in Beverly, Massachusetts. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Antioch New England, a certificate of advanced graduate study in human development from Harvard University, and three master’s degrees – one in psychopharmacology from the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, one in counseling from Boston University and one in creative writing from Boston University. In 1994, Who's Who in America named Dr. Baures Woman of the Year.
Before she became a psychologist, Dr. Baures was a writer. She interviewed writers such John Cheever and artists such as Minor White and published articles in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, the New Age Journal and many other publications. She taught creative writing in the MFA Program at Emerson College where she directed a highly successful writers’ conference.During her doctoral work, she noticed that most of the psychological literature described how people became ill from traumatic experiences. Many writers she knew used creativity to process the themes of a crisis and transformed in positive ways.

Click here to read printable PDF

Creativity and Cognititive Slippage - William De Kooning
Presentation by Dr. Mary Baures at the Creativity and Madness Medical Conference, Sante Fe, New Mexico
February 14, 2008

This PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Baures was supposed to have images of paintings integratied into the talk. Somehow the conference staff did not do this and the images were clumped out of order into the beginning.

As Dr. Baures reviewed the images in fromt of the audience, she asked the audience to remember certain paintings which her talk would later critique.

Baures shows how after De Kooning had lost both memory and speech, he could still paint well. De Kooning's work shows that many thoughts and feelings are happening in dementia patients that they are unable to express. It is hard for us as doctors and as family members to understand the internal life of someone without language.

De Kooning's paintings chart a course through his cognitive damage. As his illness progressed, he became happier and lost the torment that drove him to drink.

Dr. Baures research Undaunted Spirits – Portraits of Recovery from Trauma was published in 1994 by Charles Press. In 1996 she contacted Oscar winning film makers Cambridge Documentary Films and together they worked on a documentary - Strong at the Broken Places- Turning Trauma into Recovery.

In 1992 toward the end of her doctoral work, to escape the wordy, cerebral side of school, Mary Baures took night classes at Montserrat College of Art.

The landscape of her paintings mirrors her writing on trauma recovery. Both are worlds of magical transformations where vivid and connecting things emerge from dark backgrounds. The forces that comfort and support are animal guides and winged spirits. Bulls, lions and polar bears are tenderly entwined with people lending them strength and agility while angels play banjos and dogs guard the moonlit landscape from rooftops.

Her paintings have been shown in numerous places around the North Shore of Boston. In 2004 Ditto Editions of Marblehead started making museum quality prints of Baures paintings. Eight, signed, limited edition prints are available here.