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 works where psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies,anthropology and medical humanities meet. She writes about the threshold, the point where a person’s inner life meets the social world. That threshold first opened in her research on ethnography and autoethnography in psychotherapy (Siddique, 2011), which grew from one idea: standing between two methods, or two identities, opens new understanding. A former Associate Professor of Psychoanalytic Anthropology in Human Development in New England, she brings clinical and anthropological training to her work. From that vantage she has written about Western culture and the inner shape of selfhood (Siddique, 2019), about moments when a professional frame proves too small for the human situation before her (Siddique, 2016), and about what screens do to therapeutic presence (Siddique, 2023). Her writing sets fact against fiction on purpose. The friction between them is the point, the place where a fixed account loosens and something truer can form. That friction, she suggests, is where the healing work begins. The same discomfort with fixed frames shapes how she reads difference. Salma treats intersectionality as lived experience, not a stack of labels, and asks what right anyone has to hand another person a category she would not live inside herself. Across her private practice and scholarly networks, she returns to one question: how do people hold each other across borders, disciplines and languages without reducing anyone to a heading? Her work with the Scottish Human Rights Defenders Fellowship sharpens that question into a matter of safety. She supports referral pathways and psychosocial care for human rights defenders and for people put at risk by protecting others, where the wrong label in the wrong place carries real danger. Here her concerns converge. Intercultural and intergenerational trauma pass down through families and communities long after the first wound, and ecocide adds a further layer of loss, severing people from land, memory and future. Healing justice holds these threads together, asking not only how a person recovers but how the conditions that harmed them might change. That future orientation runs through her thinking on fragmentation, disconnection, displacement, the leaving and the arriving, and the exile from a part of oneself when the past stays active in the present. She sees people as makers of worlds rather than finders of one ready-made world. Her task, she says, lies less in returning someone to what they lost and more in walking beside them as they build something new. This is the ground the curation the idea of Third Space Practice was built to hold. Salma founded the advocacy, consultancy in 2025 as a space for dialogue across the different realities of healing justice. In psychoanalytic anthropology and the medical humanities, the third space names the psychological ground formed between patient and therapist, where new thought and relational change grow. It also speaks to diaspora and hybridity, the self built from the meeting of more than one culture. The same commitment to shared, unfinished work runs through her academic roles. She chairs the Values Group for the European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy (EJQRP) as the journal marks its 20th anniversary, and serves on the International Advisory Board for Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice. As an external examiner and supervisor across BSc, MSc and doctoral levels, she walks with students into territory she has not fully mapped, helping them sit with uncertainty where new insight often forms. 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 Q. Marak (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 Siddique, S. (preparing for publication, 2026). What we cannot yet say: Inclusive language, epistemic humility, and the slow work of EJQRP’s Values Group. Paper presented at the 20th Anniversary Celebration of the European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy. https://ejqrp.org/ Siddique, S. (forthcoming, 2027). Attachment is unfinished in the institutions we inherit. In L. Greenspan & S. Siddique (Eds.), Supporting connection: Attachment and autism., The Bowlby Centre. https://thebowlbycentre.org.uk/

Mark Stein PhD is Professor Emeritus of Leadership and Management at the University of Leicester, an Associate Lecturer in Consultation and Organisation at the Tavistock Clinic, a Career Consultant at Careers in Depth, and an executive coach and organisational consultant. He is also a founding scholar of the BPC, and has also been an Adjunct Professor and Visiting Scholar at INSEAD, Fontainebleau. He has been awarded the European Academy of Management’s iLab Prize for innovative scholarship; an Emerald Citation of Excellence; the ‘Group & Organization Management’ best paper prize; the Gavin Macfadyen Memorial Essay Prize; and the Richard Normann Prize.

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.