Ernest Jones Lecture 2025
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytical Society (incorporating the Institute of Psychoanalysis)
Description
“Navigating Racialised Experience: Reflections on Identity and Resilience”
Speaker: Sonita Alleyne, OBE, FRSA
Chaired by Elizabeth Coates Thümmel, President-Elect of the British Psychoanalytical Society
In this year’s Ernest Jones Lecture Sonita Alleyne, OBE, will reflect on a lifetime of navigating racialised experience, drawing out implications for identity and resilience. She writes, “I am proud of my life and what I have achieved. However, I was born into a legacy I did not choose – marked by the hue of my skin and the weight it carries in the eyes of others. For fifty-four years, I have walked through spaces shaped by others’ assumptions, exclusions, and my own quiet reckonings. I’ve learned to rise above, but not been untouched. The journey has left its imprint – both as burden and gift.
In this lecture, I offer reflections from a life lived at the intersection of selfhood and society, where race is never incidental, and racism never abstract. I ask: what wisdom can be passed on to those who come next, navigating similar storms with different names? What strength is forged in silence, in resistance, in grace?
And if I were to sit in the therapist’s chair, would I find someone able to hold the whole of me? Could they truly hear my story, shaped not only by the personal, but by the deep undercurrents of history, structure, and collective forgetting?
This is not just my story – it is a mirror, a map, and a question that echoes.”
