Meet our Scholars

I became a Founding Scholar of the BPC in 2019 and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in 2021. After almost 20 years of programme leadership overseeing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and research in Media and Communications, I now work as an SME/consultant at the intersection of technology, health, and wellbeing. My peer-reviewed research exploring the psychocultural dynamics of technology and visual culture has been published widely in edited volumes, journal articles, and encyclopaedia. In 2022, my book Toy Story and the Inner World of the Child was published in the Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture Series (Routledge/Karnac Press). This book explored themes of animation, play and creative life within the history of film and animation through an object-relations lens. Today, I also publish the Healing Media newsletter, in which I explore themes of technology, health, and wellbeing, including the radical upheaval of AI and its impacts on organisations, communities, and individuals. Theories of relating and thinking are very much a guidepost for this.

Dr. Richard Duggins is a Consultant Psychiatrist, Medical Psychotherapist, and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. He is an experienced Balint Group Leader and Schwartz Round Lead, with a particular focus on reflective practice in healthcare. His academic and research interests include work-related burnout, the mental health of health professionals, and the role of reflective practice in enhancing professional well-being. He is the author of Burnout-Free Working: Your Expert Guide to Thriving in a Stressful Workplace (2025), which explores evidence-based strategies for mitigating occupational stress.

John Fletcher is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of 'Warwick. He has published on a range of psychoanalytic topics, mainly associated with the work of Freud, Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche, five volumes of whose work he has edited and co-translated into English: Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives (1992), Essays on Otherness (1999), New Formations no. 48 Jean Laplanche and the Theory of Seduction (2003), Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006 (2011) as well as Seductions and Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory, Culture (2014), coedited with Nicholas Ray. He has recently published a monograph on Freud and the Scene of Trauma (2013). His presentation of Laplanche's metapsychology has appeared in "Seduction and the Vicissitudes of Translation: the Work of Jean Laplanche', Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXVI, no 4, 2007; also "Jean Laplanche: the unconscious, the id and the other", vol.33, no 1, 2017. He has also published numerous articles on literary and film topics from a psychoanalytic perspective: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, the fiction of E.T.A. Hoffman, the ghost stories of Henry James, E.M. Forster's Maurice, Wilhelm ]ensen's Gradiva; the poetry of William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, John Brahms and George Cukor. He is currently Honorary Senior Research Associate, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London.

Dr. Fuery’s research explores why we mediate the world around us in the ways that we do, examining how our inner worlds influence the social and cultural contexts which influence our choices. She is the author of five books, including Visual Cultures and Critical Theory (co-authored, 2003), New Media: Culture and Image (2009), The Gift and Visual Culture: Doubles, Disruption and Exchange (2008), Wilfred Bion, Thinking and Emotional Experience with Moving Images (2018), and Ambiguous Cinema: From Simone de Beauvoir to Feminist Film-Phenomenology (2022). Her current project is an edited collection titled Film Phenomenologies: Temporality, Embodiment, Transformation, (forthcoming, EUP 2024). She is a founding scholar for the British Psychoanalytic Council, an Editorial Board Member for Film-Philosophy journal and Special Issues Editor for Film Matters.

Dr Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a psychosocial theorist. She is the author of the book, ‘The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic’ (Routledge 2021), and the author and/or editor of additional articles and books on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, arts and mental health, and gender and sexuality studies. She is particularly interested in the emotional and unconscious use we make of cultural objects and experiences (film, art, literature, music, virtual reality); the writings of Wilfred Bion; and the clinical impact of psychosocial factors on the transference-countertransference dynamic. Noreen is the director of the international, interdisciplinary ‘Psychoanalysis +’ initiative. She is the director, with Allen Fatimaharan, of ‘Cultural Encounters’ (2026), an animated short film about the emotional and unconscious nourishment provided by cultural objects. She was a member of the creative team (led by Jill Bennett) for ‘World Comes Alive’ (fEEL 2025), the first virtual reality experience underpinned by psychoanalytic thinking. Noreen lectures and undertakes research in psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and reflective practice at Ulster University, Belfast. She is the Joint-Editor-in-Chief (with Emmanuelle Smith) of the BPC’s ‘New Associations’ magazine.

Sarah Hall is an accredited Jungian Analyst (BPC; IAAP) and Art Psychotherapist (HCPC; UKCP) with a Private Practice in Cornwall. She is the current Chair of Training for the Association of Jungian Analysts in London, and also works as Clinical Lead in Dual-Diagnosis at Chy rehab, in Cornwall. Sarah teaches on Jungian and Art Therapy trainings in the UK, and has presented a number of papers in the UK and internationally on Jungian dream research and addiction. As a professional artist, and former lecturer at Glasgow School of Art, she has been involved in researching the collective and personal impact of creativity by working in prisons, long stay hospitals and institutions. Her Doctoral research, undertaken in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, involved a Jungian interpretation of drug-dreams in patients in recovery from addiction, which she is currently developing into a book, with the working title: ‘Dreamcovery: a Jungian approach to addiction and recovery’.

Ann Hardy is a student on the professional doctorate programme at the University of Essex, where her research will focus on cross-neurotype couples experiencing relationship difficulties. Ann has a master’s degree in individual and couple psychodynamic psychotherapy from Tavistock Relationships. She works in private practice in South West London.

I work in education, creative arts and the public service; my professional interests are in the boundary between care and learning, and as such, 'psychodynamic incidents in teaching and learning' were the focus of my doctoral thesis. After seventeen years at the Institute of Education, in London University, I have returned to working part-time in a school. My perspective is Jungian/post-Jungian, and I have a particular interest in the interrelationship between theology, spirituality and psychology.

Kurt Jacobsen is a Lecturer in Social Sciences and a Faculty Associate in the Political Science Department of the University of Chicago. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, producer/director of half a dozen feature documentaries, and co-editor of Free Associations journal.

Jacob Johanssen is Associate Professor in Communications, St Mary’s University, London. He is the author of several books, including Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (2019); Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere (2022) and, with Steffen Krüger, Media and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Introduction (2022). Johanssen is editor of the Counterspace section of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, sits on the executive committee of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. He is also a member of the BPC's Scholars Committee.