Robert “Bob” Fancher

Bob Fancher came of age in Mississippi during the Sixties. With the utter upending of “the Mississippi way of life” during the civil rights movement, Bob realized painfully how profoundly wrong a culture’s most deeply held values and beliefs can be. When he lost his Southern Baptist faith in college—Bob’s dad was a preacher, and his mother a popular religious writer and a leader among Baptist women; Bob had planned to become a preacher himself—the lesson was indelibly reinforced.

Back then, Bob thought that someday he would find a place where everyone served truth, beauty, and justice. After a couple of decades of searching, he reluctantly concluded that notion was in error.

In counseling, Bob has a special interest in working with highly intelligent misfits and those who are skeptical of mental health care.

Intellectually, besides trying to understand generally how life works, he has a special interest in identifying and evaluating unstated assumptions, unrecognized consequences, and unacknowledged agendas.

Bob was educated as a philosopher at Vanderbilt University and trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at Blanton Peale Graduate Institute. He practiced psychotherapy for many years in New York City and now maintains a counseling practice, Life Therapy Counseling Services available at http://library/therapypdx.com, in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of Health and Suffering in America: The Context and Content of Mental Health Care and Pleasures of Small Motions: Mastering the Mental Game of Pocket Billiards.