hi all - i'm isabella.  i grew up in germany and have been in canada since 1982.  i work in mental health; by training i'm a counsellor but right now i work as a family support and involvement coordinator at a big psychiatric hospital, which is part counselling, part community engagement, part change management. i grew up among artists and intellectuals.  some of my father's closest friends were psychoanalysts;  freud and jung were as familiar to me as hockey and baseball are to my canadian counterparts. i'm taking this course just because - but also because of my interest in tarot.  i've been playing around with tarot for years (my very, very first research project was on using tarot imagery for dream incubation) but since about 3 years, when i bought a strange, somewhat obscure deck (crow's magick) i'm totally entranced with it.  i'm also thinking about doing my PhD soon, which will probably involve narrative medicine, and for some reason i'm thinking that taking this course might take me further along that path.