Meet our Scholars

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We are proud to have a growing membership of Scholars across the world. They are making a significant contribution to the advancement of psychoanalytical thinking. We are grateful for their work and engagement.

Prof Caroline Bainbridge

Caroline practices as a fully trained and accredited organisational consultant and coach. An Emeritus Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis, she also offers research consultancy services. She has written widely on psychoanalysis and popular culture, and co-edits a book series on this theme. As an author and editor her books include The Cinema of Lars von TrierA Feminine CinematicsTelevision and Psychoanalysis, and Media and the Inner World amongst others. She is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council and a former editor of Free Associations journal, and the film section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Outside work she cheers on Liverpool FC through their highs and lows, and makes the most of living close to a beach with an art installation called Another Place. This conjuncture of art on the border between land and sea fuels the imagination and soothes the soul.

Dr Joanne Brown

I have worked as an academic in the university sector for 30 years. My most recent post was at Southampton University as a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health. Before this, I worked at UEL on our psychoanalytically informed psychosocial studies BA and at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust as a course leader on the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies. I am a BPC accredited psychoanalytic couple psychotherapist, BPC accredited DIT practitioner and BACP psychodynamic counsellor. I am a visiting clinician and clinical supervisor at Tavistock Relationships and I am on the editorial board of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. My publications are in the broad area of mental health, romantic love and psychosocial studies.

Dr Joanne Brown

Dr Karen Cross

Dr Karen Cross

Dr Zack Eleftheriadou

Dr Zack Eleftheriadou MSc MA Dip IMH, Dip NCFED, is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, Chartered Scientist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (HCPC reg). She has trained as an adult (both Integrative & Psychoanalytic), child as well as a parent-infant psychotherapist (UKCP reg.) Since 1990, she has provided training and has published extensively in the following areas: developmental issues, cross-cultural work, refugees and trauma, including the text ‘Psychotherapy and Culture’ (Karnac) and the replacement child forum. Currently, she is guest tutor and clinical supervisor at ‘The Institute for Arts in Therapy and Education’ and The Bowlby Centre. Alongside her teaching work, she runs a consultancy, providing psychotherapy and supervision. She is a visiting external examiner for Doctoral level university counselling psychology & psychotherapy students.

Dr Zack Eleftheriadou

Mrs Sheyda Esmaeili

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tehran. I am a psychotherapist and lecturer (working in private practice). I have been studying psychoanalysis since 2018 under the supervision of several professors. As I progressed through my doctoral studies, I began giving lectures on topics such as shame and guilt, group relations in psychoanalysis, and trauma and affects.

In 2022 I completed a short study as a visiting researcher in the UK, under the supervision of Prof Candida Yates at Bournemouth University. It was a fantastic experience for me. Upon returning to Iran, I developed a course for psychology students based on psychosocial studies. For my doctoral thesis, I will apply Wilfred Bions’ group theory and dynamic personality theories in analyzing some platforms like Instagram. Actually, I want to know how group and personality theories work in social media.

Dr Nini Fang

My research places a strong emphasis on lived experiences, reflexively and critically exploring the impact of sociopolitical contexts on subjective experiences and unconscious processes. I have published extensively in renowned journals, particularly in the fields of psychosocial studies, critical university studies, and post-colonial scholarship.

As an accredited psychoanalytic practitioner by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), I have authored and published numerous research articles that draw upon my clinical practice and theoretical reflections in reputable international specialist journals. In addition, I serve as a COSCA-accredited trainer for the Postgraduate programs (Masters/Diploma in Counselling) at the University of Edinburgh. My teaching approach embraces anti-oppressive pedagogical praxis and advocates for a politically sensitive curriculum that addresses social inequality in the therapeutic settings.

In recognition of my sustained achievements in innovating and revitalising research practices that promote social justice and equality, I was honoured with the University-wide Good Research Practice Award in the ‘Positive Disruptor’ category in 2022. I was the winner of the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS) in 2023 for my project on ‘Decolonising Counselling and Psychotherapy: Reflections from Psychosocial Perspectives”.

Prof. Mark Featherstone

I am a specialist in social and political theory and psychoanalytic thought from Freud through Lacan to Deleuze and Guattari and Stiegler. I have spent the last two decades working on topics at the interface of social structure and individual psychology. These include conspiracy theory, the utopian imagination, and most recently ecology and the climate crisis. I am editor of the Duke University journal Cultural Politics and sit on the editorial board of a number of other academic journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Prof John Fletcher

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.

Prof Lynn Froggett

I have a practice, teaching and management background in Social Work and Social Policy and more than twenty years of research into the arts in health, welfare criminal justice and community settings. I am currently running projects on the arts in civic and place based renewal. An additional recent focus is on AgeTech and speculative design. I am founding member and Chair of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and Co-Commissioning Editor for a Policy Press Series: Advances in Biographical Methods.

Dr Kelli Fuery

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 Paul Gray

Dr Noreen Giffney

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 a number of 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); the writings of Wilfred Bion; and the clinical impact of psychosocial factors on the transference-countertransference dynamic. Noreen is the Director of ‘Psychoanalysis +’, an international, interdisciplinary initiative that brings together clinical, academic, and artistic approaches to, and applications of, psychoanalysis. She lectures and undertakes research on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and reflective practice at Ulster University, Belfast in Northern Ireland. She is a member of the editorial team for the BPC’s ‘New Associations’ magazine.

Dr Giuseppe Giordano

Sarah Harris

Sarah is a Child and Family Psychotherapist, working mainly for charities, and specialising in children, young people, and parents. She has developed a particular interest in intergenerational trauma and emotional neglect. Using psychoanalytic theories, whilst drawing on neuroscience, she has published her long-term work with a boy suffering severe trauma in the Child Psychotherapy Journal. She has a supervision and general private practice and is a Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, supervising students on the children, young people, and families’ psychotherapy training.

Sarah Harris

Dr Amin Hashemi

Amin is an interdisciplinary researcher from Iran working with ethnography and psychoanalysis. He focuses on the links between creativity and subjectivity, the regimes of truth, and the transformations of the paradigms. He is currently a research fellow at the music department of the University of Aberdeen, holding a Leverhulme fellowship, examining the making of the subjectivity of musicians with Iranian backgrounds through their musical creativity. It runs between 2022 and 2025.

Shahrzad Hashemi

I’m interested in investigating conscious and unconscious dynamics and psychosocial functions of engagement with films and television series. How and why do we choose something to watch? Why do we repeatedly watch a moving image? Why do we avoid watching some moving images? How does our experience of cultural objects such as films and television series and our thinking processes affect each other?

Dr Ambrose Hogan FCCT VR

I work in education and training, in schools, higher education, and public service professional contexts. I have written about ‘psychodynamic incidents’ in teaching and learning, and am in the process of undertaking a clinical training. I have a modest theatre practice (which is also part of my education work).

Dr Andrew Howe

I am a psychiatrist and psychodynamic therapist working in the NHS. My academic interests and publications include Jungian Theory/Analytical Psychology, Hallucinations and therapeutic communities. My current PhD is investigating the use of short-term psychodynamic therapy for hallucinations.

Dr Kurt Jacobsen

Coeditor, Free Associations since 2017. Book review editor, Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture from 2002 until 2023. Author or editor of eleven books, including ‘Freud’s Foes, Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance,’ ‘International Politics and Inner Worlds: Masks of Reason Under Scrutiny,’ ‘Pacification and Its Discontents,’ and the coedited volume “Experiencing The State.” Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Also lectured at Rutgers University, Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Imperial College London and been a visiting academic at the London School of Economics many times.

Jacob Johanssen

Dr David Jones

Dr Joanna Kellond

My research and scholarly work draws on psychoanalytic theory, sociology and Critical Theory, with an emphasis on feminist, queer and decolonial perspectives. I have a particular interest in the philosophy, theory, politics and aesthetics of social reproduction and care, and the contribution that psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity can make to developing knowledge in this area. In my monograph, Donald Winnicott and the Politics of Care, published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Studies in the Psychosocial, in 2022, I investigated what the work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott can contribute to understanding, as well as addressing, the crisis of care at the heart of contemporary society. My more recent work and current projects explore the relationship between psychoanalytic thinking and social and symbolic change.

More broadly, my research foregrounds the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and society. I explore psychoanalytic thinking as a critical discourse in the Humanities, and as both a product, and active agent, of social and cultural change. I am concerned with the relationship between psychoanalysis, as theory and practice, and social justice; the politics of mental health; and the politics of reproduction and care. Theoretically, my work draws on a range of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Freudian, Lacanian, object relational and Laplanchian approaches, as well as Critical Theory; feminist theory; gender studies; queer theory and cultural studies. Much of my research to date has explored the knots that bind psychoanalytic thinking to cultural practices and social processes.

Prof. Annette Kuhn FBA

Annette Kuhn is Emeritus Professor in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of the European Academy. Her previous academic posts were at the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University and in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She holds degrees in Sociology at the Universities of Sheffield and London and has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre, at Mount Holyoke College, USA (as Fulbright Senior ResearchScholar), and at Stockholm University. She was an editor of the journal Screen for many years, directed the ESRC-funded project ‘Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain’, and is currently working on an AHRC-funded project ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive’: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/cmda/. She convened the Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience (T-PACE) study group, and writes on film history, on object-relations psychoanalysis and film theory, and on cultural memory in relation to photography and cinema. Publications on include An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (2002); Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (2002); Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience (2010; and Edploring Cinema Memory (2023). She is co-author ,with Queen Mary colleague Guy Westwell, of the Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (2nd edition 2020).

Prof Vicky Lebeau

I have published widely in the field of psychoanalysis and the humanities, with a particular focus on visual fields. I am currently completing a monograph, ‘Fanon’s Freud’, for Stanford UP

I am a trainee member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation and the British Psychoanalytic Council and interested in the space between cultural and clinical thinking.

Prof Vicky Lebeau

Dr Jeanne Magagna

Dr. Jeanne Magagna, Tavistock trained child, adult and family psychotherapist, has worked with children and their parents as a nursery teacher, secondary and university teacher as well as subsequently being  Head of Psychotherapy Services at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children for 24 years. She has also worked as a consultant to Family Futures Adoption and Fostering Consortium and previously  Coordinator of Training at Centro Studi Martha Harris in Florence and Venice, Italy, where she now  continues to teach.

Throughout her professional life her aim is to help parents and professionals observe the deeper aspects of infants’ personality in order that infants can be better understood and have more rights to good parenting.   Her books The Silent Child: Communication without Words and Being Present for Your Nursery Age Child discuss how important it is to collaborate with parents to support and understand their children and parents have been involved in these writing projects. With the collaboration with Roz Read  she has edited Contemporary Child Psychotherapy.  Other collaboratively edited books include: Psychotherapy with Families, Intimate Transformations,  Creativity and Psychotic States and A Psychotherapeutic Understanding of Children and Young People.  Jeanne currently works on most continents teaching infant observation, discussing collaborative work with parents, and engaging in clinical discussions.

Phd in Child Psychotherapy from the Tavistock Clinic and University of East London
Former Head of Psychotherapy Services, Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, UK

Dr Jeanne Magagna

Prof Julian Manley

Dr Alison Mark

I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, BPF member and BPC Registrant. Psychoanalysis, literature, and culture are my main interests. I have written a book on the poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson; a range of other articles, literary and psychoanalytic; and co-edited Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice with Deryn Rees-Jones. I am an editor of the journal Women: a Cultural Review, and would be pleased to hear of papers and articles that may be suitable for the journal.

Prof James Martin

I’m a scholar of political theory with an interest in the history of ideas, forms of public speech, and aesthetic approaches to politics. I have drawn upon psychoanalytic theory to explore types of political argument and the affective dispositions these incite.

Ana Martinez-Acobi

Ana Martinez Acobi is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Training Therapist in private practice since 2001. She has trained both in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychodynamic Counselling at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation (WPF). She also holds an Honours Degree in Psychology (BSc) from Goldsmiths’ University, London.

She is accredited by the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) and the Foundation for Psychotherapy and Counselling (FPC), and is a member of the British Psychological Society (BPS).

Ana is interested in studying the unity between Psychoanalysis and Metaphysics. In October 2022 she published a book with Routledge titled: ‘The Emergent Container in Psychoanalysis: Experiencing Absence and Future’.

Prof Dany Nobus

T: 020 7431 4196

Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London and Associate Editor of the journal ‘Psychoanalysis and History’. He has also been Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Professor of Psychiatry at Creighton University in Omaha NE. He is the author of numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Studies in Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge 2022). In 2027 he was the recipient of the Sarton Medal of the University of Ghent for his outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic historiography.

Dr Michael O'Loughlin

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

Dr Susie Orbach FRSL

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and co-founder with Luise Eichenbaum of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London (1976) and The WTCI in New York (1981).

She is the author of many books. Her most recent In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an expanded edition of In Therapy (an annotated version of the BBC series listened to live by 2 million people). Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Bodies (which won the APA Psychology of Women’s Book Prize in 2009) was updated in 2019.

She has also published many papers and frequently writes for the press. She wrote a column in The Guardian for ten years. She has co-authored recent government papers.

For ten years, she was Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Social Policy at LSE. She was Academic Visitor at Hertford College, Oxford. She is the recipient of many honorary doctorates and has lectured worldwide.

She is the recipient of the Inaugural British Psychoanalytic Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2019.

Prof Barry Richards

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.

Dr Poul Rohleder

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 and minoritised and stigmatised identities, and has published a number of papers in this area. He is also interested in psychotherapy research.

Prof Lyndal Roper

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.

Prof Sasha Roseneil MInstGA PFHEA FAcSS

I am an interdisciplinary social scientist and group analyst. First trained in sociology, then involved in developing the fields of gender studies, and more recently, psychosocial studies, my research is concerned with how gender, sexuality, subjectivity and intimate life are changing, with citizenship and belonging, and with the role that social movements and collective action play in bringing about social, cultural and political change. I am also interested in how and why gender, sexuality, subjectivity and intimate life don’t change – with individual and collective resistance to change, and how we so often unconsciously resist change and sabotage what might be good and fruitful in our lives.

Dr Alistair Ross

T: 07872626321

Alistair’s research focusses on the interface between psychoanalysis and spirituality. He is currently working on some letters written by Harry Guntrip. He is also working on a book re-telling the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur from a psychodynamic perspective.

Dr Timothy Secret

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.

Dr Timothy Secret

Dr Jonathan Sklar

My analytic writings range from Freud-Ferenczi, Balint and Winnicott as well as psychosomatics and the analysis of severe trauma and schizophrenia
I write about understanding Society and the deterioration in politics utilising analytic understanding of states of sado-masochism and the difficulties of debate when one is cancelled.
Books:
Landscapes of the Dark-history ,trauma ,psychoanalysis Karnac 2011Balint Matters -psychosomatics and the art of assessment Karnac 2017Dark Times -psychoanalytic perspectives on politics, history and mourning .Phoenix 2019To be published later this year:
The Soft Power of Culture -essays on psychoanalysis and the capacity to play in life Phoenix

Prof Mark Stein Ph.D.

Dr Lucy Stroud

Dr Stroud’s PhD research at the University of Aberdeen focused on analysing Real Life magazines through a psychosocial lens, drawing on her extensive experience as a journalist working on national newspapers and Real Life magazines. Her 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 her particular interest in socio-economic and political loss, she applies a psychosocial lens to her research to explore the psychical implications of loss and how it becomes inscribed in a particularly classed and gendered form of melancholia.

Since completing her PhD, Dr Stroud has been delighted to work for the 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.

Dr Stroud a Visiting Scholar at Edinburgh University upon receiving the ISRF Early Career Fellow 2023-2024. Her current research works with socially deprived teenage girls in Aberdeen to create a ‘real life’ magazine to explore and archive the lived experiences of this demographic. This demographic, disproportionately affected by the pandemic, report high levels of poor mental wellbeing (Crenna-Jennings, 2021). The project takes further my concept of ‘social melancholia’: the psychosocial phenomenon which manifests when there has been no social or communal space to grieve the many socio-economic and political losses that have been experienced by those from a lower socio-economic background. This lack of resources and opportunity to form collectives, gain and sustain support from one another further isolate the already vulnerable individuals.

Dr Stroud is on the Executive Board of the Association of Psychosocial Studies, the Editorial Board of The Journal of Psychosocial Studies and is the Chair of the ECR/PhD Association of Psychosocial Studies subcommittee.

Prof Barbara Taylor

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.

Dr Theodora Thomadaki

Dr. Theodora Thomadaki, an award-winning academic, dynamic public speaker, and mentor is a distinguished figure in academia and female empowerment. She is an expert in Reality TV, lifestyle media, makeover culture, post-feminism, and object relations psychoanalysis. Theodora completed her B.Sc. in Psychology University of Surrey and Ph.D. in Cultural studies at the University of Roehampton and received her MA in psychoanalytic studies (M16) training from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She has published work in the Journal of Free Associations and also in Clothing Cultures by Intellect.

Dr. Theodora is a notable speaker for the Queens in Business Club, where she shares profound insights into the intersection of makeover TV, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Collaborating with British Fashion expert Gok Wan, Dr. Theodora has been featured in magazines and journals, emphasizing the transformative impact of ’empower dressing.’ Her inspirational chapter in ‘Determined to Rise,’ titled ‘Discovering Your Potential Will Never Go Out of Style,’ empowers women to break through boundaries. Dr. Theodora’s commitment to uplifting women is both acknowledged and celebrated with awards and recognitions.

Dr. Theodora has been an academic lecturer for over 12 years, and in the past two years, she has taken her Tavistock method to the University of East London – Partnerships, leading and managing the School of Architecture, Computing, and Engineering. She has forged successful collaborations with industry giants such as IBM, ITV, WPP, Colas Rail, Morgan Sindall, TfL, Metropolitan Police, British Airways, Vodafone, Royal Navy, and other esteemed employers, bridging the gap between industry and academia. Her outstanding contributions have been honored with the Vice-Chancellor & President Excellence Award 2023 for Outstanding Contribution, a testament to her dedication to empowering students and facilitating groundbreaking industry opportunities, with her psychoanalytic knowledge being at the core of her success.

Dr Patricia Townsend

Patricia Townsend is an artist and a writer. She was formerly a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at St George’s Hospital Eating Disorders Service. Her writing explores the intersection between art and psychoanalysis and her book ‘Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process’ was published by Routledge in 2019. Whilst studying for a PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, she interviewed professional visual artists about the states of mind they experience whilst making new works. Twenty-five of these interviews are now archived in the British Library and are available to researchers. Her moving image, photography and installation works have been exhibited widely, most recently at Brantwood, John Ruskin’s former home in Coniston.

Ilonka Venier Alexander

T: +1 902 746 4239

Born in Chicago, grew up in Southern California. Obtained MSW from USC in 1985 and worked thereafter in the field of mental health as a clinical social worker, a manager, and a researcher in two separate countries. In 2015 I wrote a biography of my grandfather, analyst Franz Alexander, after whom I am named and who assumed the role of father for me. In 2018 I wrote a memoir of the growing up with this man as my father, a giant in the field of psychoanalytic thought and practice. Working now on 4th book “Freud’s Honorary Son: Exploring the Theories of Franz Alexander”.

Ilonka Venier Alexander

Prof Neil Vickers

Dr Angie Voela

Dr Marita Vyrgioti

I am Lecturer in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex and a trainee psychodynamic psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.

I have a long-standing interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism, in terms of their historical overlapping and the im/possibilities of the psychoanalytic clinic in colonial settings, but also in the epistemological and ethical implications of coloniality for the theorisation of the psychoanalytic subject. Drawing on my clinical work, I have also developed an interest in the psychoanalytic understanding of extreme states of mind. My research often revolves around questions of liminality, especially in relation to the ontological position of the racialised subject, and life on the boundary between life and death, humanness and non-humanness, as well as ‘zones of non being’.

Mr Lindsay Wells

Dr Deborah Wright

Dr Deborah L. S. Wright, is a BPC registrant, a Psychotherapist in private practice and an Academic, Lecturer, and Programme Director of the Clinical Professional Doctorate Programs, in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at The University of Essex, as well as an Artist, Printmaker, and Illustrator. Her academic and art works explore human’s relationships with spaces, places and rooms and her book, ‘The Physical and Virtual Space of the Consulting Room: Room-object spaces’ explores Room-object spaces and spatialisation.

Catriona Wrottesley

Naomi Wynter-Vincent

Naomi Wynter-Vincent writes on the work of Wilfred Bion in relation to literary criticism, experimental and creative writing, and creative process. She is currently Assistant Professor within the English faculty at Northeastern University London. Her book, Wilfred Bion and Literary Criticism, was published by Routledge in 2021, and she has presented in conferences in the UK, Italy, Finland, and Brazil.

She holds a first degree from the University of Cambridge, master’s degrees from Sussex and UCL, and completed her PhD with the University of Sussex. She is also an experienced somatic therapist (certified Advanced Rolfer and Rolf Movement practitioner) and coach in private practice, focusing on embodiment, body dysmorphia, and resilience.

Naomi Wynter-Vincent

Prof Candida Yates

Professor Candida Yates (PhD, MA, BA, FHEA, FRSA) is an interdisciplinary scholar, teacher and group practitioner with a background in psychosocial studies and psychoanalysis and their application to politics, culture, media and society. She works with scholars, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and creative practitioners to provide new understandings of emotion and affect in the public sphere – creating bridges between therapeutic, cultural and academic fields of research and practice.

Prof Yates is Co-Director of the BU Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice; an Executive Board Member and Trustee of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and an Academic Associate of The Freud Museum; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Prof Yates has published on a range of psychosocial, cultural and political themes in monographs, including ‘The Play of Political Culture and Emotion’ and ‘Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema’, and also edited books: ‘Media and the Inner World’, ‘Culture and the Unconscious’, ‘Television and Psychoanalysis’, ‘Emotion; New Psychosocial Perspectives’, and also numerous journal articles and special editions. She is a Consulting Editor on Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (Palgrave), The Journal of Psychosocial Studies (Policy) and Joint Editor of the book series Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture (Routledge).

Prof Yates lectures on the Master Politics Programmes at Bournemouth University, and supervises PhD students in the areas of psychosocial studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, politics and society.

She is currently leading a research project on the psychodynamics of the maritime imagination.

Caroline Zilboorg

Caroline Zilboorg is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. She is the editor of the Aldington-H.D. correspondence as well as H.D’s Bid Me to Live and the author of Transgressions, a historical novel about H.D. and Aldington. Her most recent work is a biography of her father, the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg. She is currently writing a memoir entitled A Psychoanalytic Childhood: Growing Up in Mid-Century New York. She lives in a granite farm house in Brittany with her six cats.

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