Sue Fairbanks is a 1981 graduate of the MSSW program at The University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. Since 1986, she has maintained a full-time private practice in Austin with adults in individual and couples therapy and provided clinical consultation and supervision. She is a fellow at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies and a board member of the Austin Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.
Fairbanks began her professional career as an airline stewardess in the 1960s. During those years, she explored much of the external world and had a lifelong passion, nourished by her years with the airlines, about discovering the deeper inner world of the human psyche.
After graduating from the MSSW program, Fairbanks completed training to become a Certified Bioenergetic Analyst. Over the years, she trained and developed expertise in post-traumatic stress disorder, sexual abuse, dissociative disorders, gerontology and adoption. The thread that brought Fairbank’s different trainings together, along with her concurrent inner search, came about when she entered her own analysis. Fairbanks had the time and space to deeply reflect on her life as she has lived it. The exploratory and reflective nature of psychoanalytic thought knit together her inner search and different trainings into a complex ever-expanding whole. Fairbanks wishes to introduce psychoanalytic knowledge, in its many faceted forms, to students and the helping community so they, too, can have access to the rich knowledge base out of which so many subsequent psychological therapies have been formulated.