Nathalie Plaat
Nathalie Plaat is a clinical psychologist, columnist for Le Devoir, and author. She is also a Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Religion (CERC) at the Université de Sherbrooke, where she is pursuing her doctoral studies.
In 2024, she published the essay Mourir de froid c’est beau c’est long c’est délicieux with the Presses de l’Université de Montréal. In 2023, she released the collection Chroniques d’une main tendue. Courtepointes et autres récits de soi with Somme toute/Le Devoir. Throughout her public interventions, she offers reflections that stand apart from dominant discourses tending to psychopathologize human states.
Her experience of illness profoundly reshaped her way of inhabiting and conceptualizing the posture of caregivers, leading her to place the search for meaning at the centre of her scholarly work. Her research focuses in particular on the existential suffering of physicians and its relationship to their philosophical literacy.
Photo: Annick Sauvé
Sessions in which Nathalie Plaat participates
Wednesday 12 August, 2026
In 2017, a television series that appeared initially unremarkable was released by the well-known American production company HBO: The Leftovers. The opening three minutes unfold like a conventional science-fiction scenario: 2% of the planet’s population vanishes without explanation. No one understands why, how, or—most fundamentally—where these thousands of individuals have gone. From the outset, the viewer encounters the radical opacity of loss, our finitude, and the necessary relation we ma...