Sarah Slagle Arnold

Sarah Slagle Arnold grew up in Detroit in the 30's, 40's and 50's where she obtained a bachelor's degree from Wayne State University in 1953. After teaching junior high school English for two years in Dearborn, Michigan, she went to New York City to study at New York Theological Seminary obtaining a master's degree there in l957. She returned to her alma mater for a year as Advisor to the Religious Organizations and Foreign Students. Then, uncertain whether to pursue further study in theology or to follow her growing interest in psychology, she decided to become a foreign student herself for a year. Arriving in Great Britain on the Q.E.I she took all the courses in psychology offered at the University of Edinburgh and some in theology at New College, the divinity school in Edinburgh. She then spent the spring term taking tutorials and psychiatry clinics at Oxford University. Convinced now that psychology was her true calling she enrolled in a Ph. D. program in psychology at the University of Michigan. Four years later with her newly-minted Ph.D. she returned to New York City for indepth training in psychoanalysis, only available to psypchologists at that time in New York. She then spent three years as chief psychologist at the Hospital of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she met and married Dr. Charles Arnold. For the next thirty years she maintained a private practice in New York City and taught courses at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. She now lives with her husband in a house in the woods outside of Topsham, Maine where she writes and for ten years has co-led a spiritually-centered Women's Group at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Brunswick. The accomplishments she is most proud of are her two sons, Christopher and Jonathan, their wives, Melina and Erin, and five grandchildren ages two to eight.