Meet our Scholars

Harriet (she/her) is a PhD researcher and Assistant Lecturer in the department of psychosocial and psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex. Her work explores the phenomenon of erotic transference and countertransference between women in psychotherapy from a historical and contemporary perspective. Harriet enjoys networking with other researchers in similar fields, and is co-founder of the Queer Encounters research network for psychosocial researchers in gender and sexuality (www.queerencounters.org) and a member of the Association for Psychosocial Studies ECR sub-committee. She has presented papers based on her early research at conferences by the British Association for Psychotherapy and Counselling, the Association for Psychosocial Studies, and the CHASE Feminist Network, and her work is published in UK and international journals. She has volunteered for Opening Doors London, Maytree, and Mind in Tower Hamlets. She is also Research & Development Officer in the Centre for Anthropological Mental Health Research in Action in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Michael O’Loughlin, is professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University. He is co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. He published The Subject of Childhood in 2009 and edited Imagining Children Otherwise: Theoretical and Critical Perspectives on Childhood Subjectivity with Richard Johnson in 2010. He is co-editor with Cora Smith and Glenys Lobban of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in Contemporary South Africa: Contexts, Theories, and Applications (2013), and in 2013 he also edited two books on children’s emotions: The uses of psychoanalysis in working with children’s emotional lives and Psychodynamic perspectives on working with children, families and schools. He edited The ethics of remembering and the consequences of forgetting: Essays on trauma, history and memory, in 2015, as well as a companion volume, co-edited with Marilyn Charles, Fragments of trauma and the social production of suffering. In 2018 he edited and wrote the introduction to Lillian Muofhe and Ndanganeni Phaswana’s book, And we forgave them: Stories from the struggle against apartheid in Venda, South Africa. His newest book (with Secil Arac-Orhun and Montana Queler) is Lives interrupted: Psychiatric narratives of struggle and resilience, to be published in 2019. He also edits a book series, Psychoanalytic Studies: Clinical, Social, and Cultural Contexts, and he is co-editor with Awad Ibrahim, Gabrielle Ivinson and Marek Tesar of a second book series, Critical Childhood & Youth Studies: Clinical, Educational, Social and Cultural Inquiry, both with Lexington Books. He has a private practice for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on Long Island, New York. Website: michaeloloughlinphd.com Profile page: https://www.adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?PID=0064

Barry Richards is Professor of Political Psychology at Bournemouth University, UK. After training and working in clinical psychology he undertook a PhD in sociology and began an academic career. Prior to moving to Bournemouth in 2001, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Human Relations at the University of East London. His books include Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to Psychoanalysis (Dent, 1989), Disciplines of Delight: The Psychoanalysis of Popular Culture (Free Association Books, 1994), The Dynamics of Advertising (with I. MacRury & J. Botterill, Harwood, 2000), Emotional Governance: Politics, Media and Terror (Palgrave, 2007), What Holds us Together: Popular Culture and Social Cohesion (Karnac, 2018) and The Psychology of Politics (Routledge, 2019). He was a founding co-editor of the Sage journal Media, War and Conflict, and of the interdisciplinary online journal Free Associations. His interests are in the psychosocial dynamics of contemporary politics, especially concerning polarisation and extremism, and the broader dimensions of cultural change.

Poul Rohleder is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and an academic for many years. He is primarily a qualitative and inter-disciplinary researcher, in the areas of sexuality, sexual health and minoritised and stigmatised identities, and has published a number of papers in this area. He is also interested in psychotherapy research. He is on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Psychotherapy; Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy; and Psychology & Sexuality. He was the recipient of the BPC Bernard Ratigan Award for Diversity in Psychoanalysis in 2021.

I'm a historian of sixteenth-century Germany. I have written a biography of the religious reformer Martin Luther and a number of works on witchcraft in German speaking lands between 1500 and 1800. Together with the psychanalyst Daniel Pick I edited a book on Dreams and History. My work has been strongly influenced by psychoanalytic ideas.

I am a philosopher with a particular interest in topics surrounding death, mourning and eulogy, which led me into engaging with psychoanalysis. I have recently worked on psychoanalysis in relation to film, friendship, narcissism, environmental catastrophe and vitalist thought.

Salma Siddique PhD., MSc, MA, UKCP, RAI, FRSA Academic, UHI-Moray | Integrative Healthcare, Psychosocial and Psychotherapeutic Studies E-mail: [email protected] I work where psychoanalysis, anthropology and the medical humanities press against one another, not to resolve the friction, but because the friction is where the thinking happens. My research at UHI-Moray spans integrative healthcare and psychosocial psychotherapeutic studies, though I have never been entirely comfortable with the academic categorisation that often demands such a division. What I keep returning to is the threshold: the place where a person’s inner life meets the social world that has helped to shape it. My work on ethnography and auto-ethnography in psychotherapy research (Siddique, 2011) arose from a conviction that being in-between methodologically and personally is not a weakness but a condition under which certain kinds of understanding become possible. Formerly an Associate Professor of Psychoanalytic Anthropology in Human Development in New England, I bring to my current work both a clinical and an anthropological background. I have written about what Western cultural configurations do to the innermost architecture of selfhood (Siddique, 2019); about the moments when the professional frame turns out to be smaller than the human situation it is trying to hold (Siddique, 2016); and about what the digital does to therapeutic presence in the way a screen mediates and displaces the relational. This last question took shape in a chapter for Christina Moutsou’s edited collection on the dialogues between psychoanalysis and architecture (Siddique, 2023), where I tried to think about online therapy not as a replica of the consulting room but as something more like an aquarium: a space in which we are held and observed and subtly distorted, all at once. What does it mean to be present with another person when the medium itself is a kind of absence? Moutsou’s wider work on loss, on displacement, on what architecture does to the psyche provided exactly the kind of threshold thinking that my own writing keeps circling (see the-site.org.uk). I am drawn to edges. I tend to find the margins more instructive than the centre. Healing justice is not a supplement to this work. It is the lens through which I understand what the work is for what it owes to those for whom displacement is not a metaphor but a condition: the dispossessed, the structurally unseen, those whose suffering has been rendered illegible by the very systems that claim to address it. I think of this through what I call pedagogies of unrest, displacement, and dispossession frameworks developed for and with those who are disconnected, displaced, and dismissed; whose knowledge has been deauthorised and whose experience has been systematically rendered not to quite count. A conversation with Virginia R. Dominguez in American Anthropologist (Siddique & Dominguez, 2021) afforded me the opportunity to reflect on what it means to witness with an anthropological eye while seeking equity. This commitment is expressed in two collaborations that are deeply important to me. With the Scottish Human Rights Defenders Fellowship in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, I support clinical referral pathways and psychosocial care for human rights defenders the people placed at risk by the very act of protecting others, who arrive carrying forms of exposure and exhaustion that conventional therapeutic frameworks are rarely built to receive. I also work with Bea Mariam Killguss through thirdspacepractice.org, a consultancy for dialogues across the diverse realities of healing justice. Both, in their different registers, are the pedagogies of unrest made practice. Currently, I serve as Chair of the Values Group for the European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy (EJQRP). It is a role that asks me to hold the ethical underpinnings of qualitative inquiry as the journal enters its twentieth year. I am also a member of the International Advisory Board for Murmuration: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, which is committed to relational and systemic thought across therapeutic, community, and creative practice. Perhaps, the work blends fact with fiction creating friction. Whether that is a method or a disposition, I have not quite decided. As an external examiner, I work at the edge of an institution in assessing standards while remaining independent and negotiating what counts as quality rather than simply enforcing fixed criteria. As a supervisor, I accompany students into intellectual territory I haven't fully mapped myself; My role isn't to solve their research problems, but to help them work through uncertainty productively. Across BSc, MSc, and doctoral research disertation levels, what I'm really teaching is how to sit with ambiguity and incomplete understanding — the space where genuine discoveries happen. References Siddique, S. (2011). Being in-between: The relevance of ethnography and auto-ethnography for psychotherapy research. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 11(4), 310–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733145.2010.533779 Siddique, S. (2016). Bhaji on the beach: Relational ethics in practice. In Marak, Q (Ed.), Doing auto-ethnography (pp. 401–425). Series Publications. Siddique, S. (2019). Western configurations: Ways of being. In K. Martin (Ed.), Psychotherapy, anthropology and the work of culture (pp. 121–138). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429060311-7 Siddique, S., & Dominguez, V. R. (2021). Anthropology in the consulting room: An interview with Salma Siddique by Virginia R. Dominguez. American Anthropologist, 123(1), 179–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13531 Siddique, S. (2023). Observing and consulting in the digital aquarium: Exploring the shifting waterscapes of online therapy. In C. Moutsou (Ed.), Dialogues between psychoanalysis and architecture: The relational space of the consulting room through the senses (pp. 162–175). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003346845

My PhD research at the University of Aberdeen focused on analysing Real Life magazines through a psychosocial lens, drawing on my extensive experience as a journalist working on national newspapers and Real Life magazines. My research highlights the neoliberal agenda embedded in the production and consumption of Real Life magazines, examining their emotional and psychosocial impact on readers and the broader media environment. With my particular interest in socio-economic and political loss, I apply a psychosocial lens to to explore the psychical implications of loss and how it becomes inscribed in a particularly classed and gendered form of melancholia. Since completing my PhD, I was a Independent Social Research Fellowship (ISRF), Independent Scolar Fellow 2023 with my project " Re-imagining the Real Life magazine, teenage girls and melancholic communities," working with socially deprived female teenagers from Aberdeen to create a real life magazine. I also work at Aberdeen cultural organisation Station House Media Unit (shmu), contributing to their work empowering people from lower socio economic backgrounds to take space in the media, make their voices heard and share their experiences authentically – work that helps challenge dominant conceptions of class and gender. I am on the Executive Board of the Association of Psychosocial Studies (APS), the Chair of APS ECR/PhD Reading Group, the Editorial Board of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies and a Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

I am a historian of subjectivity who uses psychoanalytic theory in my research and writing. Most recently my work has focused on the history of solitude from the late 17th century to the present.