Scholars’ Network Spotlight: Salma Siddique
Dr Salma Siddique PhD, MSc, MA (Hons) | FRSA, FRAI, FHEA | UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Clinical Anthropologist and Academic
Dr Salma Siddique works 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. This is not a methodological position arrived at by convenience. It is a form of intellectual honesty: a refusal to let the category do the work that the thinking must do.
She is Research Lead for Counselling Studies and Integrative Healthcare at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI Moray), Scotland, where her research spans integrative healthcare and psychosocial psychotherapeutic studies relating to the diverse realities of the marginalised, displaced and disconnected. She is a former Associate Professor of Psychoanalytic Anthropology in Human Development at a New England university in the USA and maintains a small private practice at www.bricolage.scot. She co-founded Thirdspacepractice.org with Bea Mariam Killguss, through which she offers clinical supervision and consultancy. Her 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. She has 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 how a screen mediates, displaces, and occasionally deepens the relational (Siddique, 2027). Her chapter on the psychoanalytic couch, written with Christina Moutsou, explores how the material objects of the consulting room hold the histories of both analyst and analysand, and how the politics of the supine position of who sees and who is seen are never merely clinical (Moutsou & Siddique, 2024). Her forthcoming chapter in the edited volume arising from the 28th Annual John Bowlby Memorial Conference argues that attachment is not a gift institutions offer. Still, a problem they create, manage, and frequently withhold. Drawing on Bowlby, Fonagy, Praslova, Yengde, and her own epistemology of the in-between, the chapter insists that fitting in and belonging are not the same thing, and that the distance between them is where much of the suffering lives. As she writes: “The canary does not make the air toxic. The canary makes the toxicity legible. What the institution does with that information is a moral choice” (Siddique, 2027, forthcoming).
Dr Siddique is Chair of the Values Group for the European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy (EJQRP). The group’s remit is to hold the journal’s ethical orientation across questions of power, positionality, and whose knowledge counts in psychotherapy research. Its inaugural article, co-authored by Values Group members, examines twenty years of evolving language in qualitative research and argues that inclusive language is not a terminus but a continuing practice of epistemic humility, an acknowledgement that our filters, however carefully examined, are never fully visible to ourselves. The group draws on decolonial theory, phenomenology, and linguistic relativity (informing a reviewer’s, editors and researchers encountering writing research ) to insist that the journal’s next decades must move beyond inherited epistemological enclosures towards indigenous ways of knowing, taken seriously as theoretical partners rather than objects of study (EJQRP Values Group, in press).
Contact: [email protected]
References:
- Moutsou, C., & Siddique, S. (2024). Touching nostalgia and regret when lying to tell the truth on the couch. In [Editor(s)] (Eds.), Dialogues between psychoanalysis and architecture. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003346845-5
- 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. (2017). [Epistemology of the in-between — full citation to be confirmed at proof stage].
- Siddique, S. (2018). Grace notes XXIV: Mobbing during a time of scarcity: the Transactional Analyst, 8(1), 41.
- Siddique, S. (2018). Impact of workplace bullying on group cohesion using emotional exhaustion as mediator and neuroticism as moderator [Doctoral dissertation].
- 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., & Domínguez, V. R. (2021). Anthropology in the consulting room: An interview with Salma Siddique by Virginia R. Dominguez. American Anthropologist, 123(1), 179–183.
- Siddique, S. (2024). Observing and consulting in the digital aquarium: Exploring the shifting waterscapes of online therapy. In [Editor(s)] (Eds.), Dialogues between psychoanalysis and architecture. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003346845-14
- Siddique, S. (2024). Attachment is unfinished in the institutions we inherit. In [Editor(s)] (Eds.), Supporting connection: Attachment and autism [Keynote proceedings, all conference presenters’ papers 28th Annual John Bowlby Memorial Conference, 11 October 2025]. Forthcoming.
- Siddique, S EJQRP Values Group: Chair’s Reflections (2026) (preparing for 20th anniversary publication of journal ). What we cannot yet say: Inclusive language, epistemic humility, and the slow work of EJQRP’s Values Group. European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy.
