Jean-François Jodouin, PhD

I came to psychology by a long road. My first doctorate, in cognitive science at the Université Paris-Sud in 1993, concerned neural networks and language, and led to two books on the subject. For the following fifteen years I worked as a consultant, then as the co-founder and chief technology officer of a London technology company, and, after my certification in 2007, as a coach, in France, the United Kingdom and Canada. I trained in Gestalt therapy during those years and began practising psychotherapy in France. I then returned to university in Montréal and completed a second doctorate, in clinical psychology at the Université de Montréal, with a thesis on sexual desire and sexual behaviour in couples, while continuing to practise. I have been a licensed clinical psychologist in Québec since 2021.

The body has been a foundation of my practice from the first. I began training in bodywork at fifteen and taught my first course at twenty. Over the following decades I trained and practised in shiatsu and Californian massage in France, the United Kingdom and Canada, and from 2007 to 2012 I co-founded and co-directed a bodywork school in France, with its own multi-year training programmes. My own practice of yoga and, later, martial arts belongs to the same attention. This is the ground of what I now practise and teach as psychosomatic psychotherapy, also called body psychotherapy or somatic therapy: the body is not an accessory to the conversation but part of it.

I trained in Gestalt therapy (a humanistic experiential psychotherapeutic approach), first over four years at the École Parisienne de Gestalt, then in a two-year specialisation at the Center for Somatic Studies in New York. My psychotherapy practice began in France after that certification, in 2012, and continued in Montréal alongside my doctoral studies. Gestalt gave me what the academic training did not: a way of working with what is present in the room, in the body of the person and in the contact between us, rather than only with what is said about it. In the consulting room this means that a sensation, a breath or a gesture is as much material as a thought, and that exercises are invitations, never requirements.

Today, much of my clinical work and my research is with couples, non-monogamous relationships, sexuality, sexual pain and trauma. I was a member of the Sexual Wellness Lab at the Université de Montréal and completed my clinical internship at the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) in Montréal. Since then, I have published on these questions, taught them at the Université de Montréal and UQAM, and trained physicians and psychologists in the psychological side of sexual pain. The work with couples taught me something that carries into everything else: a symptom rarely belongs to one person alone.

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy now runs through my clinical, teaching and research work. I trained with Numinus between 2023 and 2024, then in ketamine-assisted therapy at the Jewish General Hospital and in MDMA-assisted therapy with TheraPsil, whose practitioner training I now contribute to. I lecture in psychedelic studies at the University of Ottawa, where I am the clinical lead of a clinical trial, now in preparation, of MDMA-assisted couple therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder in first responders, and co-designed its therapeutic and study protocols. In practice, I offer psychedelic harm reduction and integration and, where legal and appropriate, psychedelic-assisted therapy. This work brings together, in one setting, the body, the relationship and a state of mind in which both can be approached differently.

Since 2016, I have taught at three universities in Québec and Ontario. I also supervise doctoral students at the Université de Montréal and interns at the Psychologia clinic. This work builds on earlier teaching, in the 1990s, at universities and engineering schools in France and Canada.

Alongside university teaching, I have designed and led professional training programmes. Between 2014 and 2016, I co-founded and co-directed a four-year psychotherapy training programme recognised by the Ordre des psychologues du Québec. Since 2007, I have also trained and coached managers and teams in Europe and North America. Teaching, for me, is experiential in the same sense as therapy: people learn to work with the body and with contact by doing it, in a group, with feedback.

Before and alongside psychology, I have worked with organisations and communities: as a consultant since 1994 and a coach since 2007, in Europe and North America; as a co-founder and chief technology officer of a London technology company in the 2000s; and in the governance of non-profit organisations, in Québec, in the United Kingdom and, since 2024, in an eco-community in Portugal. That experience of how groups change, and resist change, informs the way I run trainings and retreats.