Lea hindley smith biography

A behind-the-scenes look at a 1970s phenomenon, this study--written by someone who was involved in and a key member of the movement--discusses Therafields and how 900 people came to live in a therapeutic community in Toronto.
When Lea was an infant, her mother, Sophia, left her husband, Philip, because of his gambling.
Follow Lea Hindley-Smith and explore their bibliography from Amazon's Lea Hindley-Smith Author Page.

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Book review: Therafields by Grant Goodbrand

Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune
By Grant Goodbrand. ECW Press, 259 pp, hardcover

It’s unsettling reviewing a book with a picture of your own mother, unnamed as if only background to the greater story, within its pages. Such is my experience of Grant Goodbrand’s Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune, the first published history of the experimental movement that flourished in and around Toronto in the ’60s and ’70s.

The book centres on Therafields’ charismatic and highly intuitive founder and leader, Lea Hindley-Smith, whose unaccredited private counselling successes in the late ’50s led to group therapy in the ’60s, with many participants living together in “house groups”. Catholics radicalized by Vatican II—nuns, priests, academics—joined this movement, some forming the first stream to train as therapists within the organization; Goodbrand, an atheist himself, was among those first student-clients central to the later growth of Therafields.

And

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Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith's Psychoanalytic Commune (Hardcover)

By Grant Goodbrand

Description

At one point in the 1970s, 900 people were engaged with a therapeutic community in Toronto. Living together, and sharing emotional problems, the participants helped to create an institution owning houses, farms, and buildings. Therafields, the largest urban commune in Canada, was created by Lea Hindley-Smith, a woman from England with no formal training in therapy. But she exuded an astounding charisma, and developed ardent followers.

Initially, students and faculty from St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, were drawn to her, and gradually the word spread that this woman had enormous power to listen, and to heal. Carpenters, poets, teachers, lost souls — they all found a home in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood. And according to one of her followers at the time, Lea “was a gifted healer, a real estate entrepreneur — and, as it turned out, a woman stalked by madness.”

When the real estate market tur

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A Sixties Tale: Grant Goodbrand’s Therafields

I don’t ever read books about historical events that involve me, because there aren’t any. Or so I thought until I got my hands on a wonderful book about one of the most interesting experiments of the storied Nineteen-Sixties. The book’s called Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune, and its author, Grant Goodbrand, himself a psychotherapist, was an eyewitness/participant in the events he relates. And — in the interests of full disclosure — so was I. Goodbrand, by the way, is not a close personal friend. I hardly knew him during our years in Therafields — a group which, by the way, has produced more than its share of artists and writers, including the late poet bpNichol.

For those of you who’ve never lived in Toronto, Therafields is part of city lore. It was a psychoanalytic community created over a twenty-year period by Lea Hindley-Smith, a gifted and charismatic lay analyst from Britain. It began in the early Sixties, and at its peak, it may well have been the largest commune in Nor