Meet our Scholars

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 Trier, A Feminine Cinematics, Television 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.

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center and Co-Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS).  Affiliations include Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; Universidad de Monterrey; Harvard Medical School. Books include: Patterns; Constructing Realities; Learning from Experience; Working with Trauma; Psychoanalysis and Literature; Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); Women and Psychosis and Women and The Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown); The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education (with Jill Bellinson).

Psycho-Social Studies and methodologies, particularly interested in theories of affect and continental philosophy; festivals and ritual studies; Group Relations and organisational dynamics; Sociology of Disability and Social Pedagogy

I research digital visual cultures and the impact of social media on conceptions of the self and wider society. I have authored works on themes ranging from play in children’s animation to citizen witnessing and the shifting aesthetics of visual media expertise. I also research new conceptions of community in digital culture and the impacts of ‘the networked society’ on citizen town planning processes. Further information about my current projects and a list of my publications can be found on my institutional homepage.

She is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is an adult, child and parent infant psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She provides training and has published extensively in the following areas: developmental issues, cross-cultural work and trauma, including the text ‘Psychotherapy and Culture’. She teaches at The Institute of Arts in Therapy and Education and The Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy, and also works in private practice [NOEMA] in providing psychotherapy and supervision. She is a member of The Bowlby Centre where she is also a guest tutor. She has previously worked at Nafsiyat and Freedom for Torture and several London NHS hospitals.

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.

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”.

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.

John Fletcher has published on 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 also published a monograph on Freud and the Scene of Trauma (2013). His papers on Laplanche’s metapsychology include, “Seduction and the Vicissitudes of Translation: the Work of Jean Laplanche”, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 76, 4, 2007; “‘His Majesty the Ego’: from Freud to Laplanche”, Sitegeist, No. 4, Spring, 2010; “La sublimation à l’origine: translation-from-the-beginning as a metapsychological category”, in La séduction à l’origine: l’oeuvre de Jean Laplanche, ed. Dejours and Votadoro, Paris: PUF, 2016; “Jean Laplanche: the unconscious, the id and the other”, BJP, 33, 1, 2017.

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 Wayne Full is a Senior Research Fellow at BACP, a British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) Scholar and member of the Society for Psychotherapy (SPR). He has a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies and a MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies from the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit, specialising in psychoanalytic theory and practice in relation to same-sex sexual orientation. From 2013-2021, he was a member of the BPC Task Group of Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Diversity (GSRD). At BACP, he is a member of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Task and Finish Group. He is soon to train as a Jungian psychotherapist at the BJAA. He has taught psychoanalytic theory and practice on several MSc programmes.

Paul is a Reader in Criminology at Manchester Metropolitan University and Deputy Director of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies. Prior to joining Manchester Metropolitan in 2011, he spent 15 years conducting applied criminological research in a number of private, public and voluntary sector organisations. His current research focusses on the relationship between childhood trauma and adolescent violence and substance use.

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, 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 and psychosocial studies at Ulster University, Belfast in Northern Ireland. She is a member of the Editorial Team for the BPC’s ‘New Associations’ magazine.

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.

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.

Ambrose Hogan is interested in the application of psychodynamic ideas and experiential clinical knowledge to teaching and learning in mainstream settings. His work draws on professional experiences as a teacher in secondary and higher education and both personal and didactic analysis. He is also interested in how performance can be used to create understanding and broaden access to this knowledge.

Co-editor, Free Associations. Published eleven books. Produced and directed half a dozen feature documentaries.

My research takes place at the intersections between psychoanalytic theory, Critical Theory, cultural theory and feminist philosophy. I have a particular interest in the philosophy, theory, politics and aesthetics of care, and the contribution that psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity can make to academic knowledge in this area. More broadly, my research interests centre on the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and society. I am interested in exploring psychoanalytic thinking as a critical discourse in the Humanities, and as both a product, and active agent, of social and cultural change. Theoretically, my work draws on Freudian, Lacanian, object relations and relational approaches, as well as Critical Theory; feminist theory; gender studies; and cultural studies. Much of my research to date has explored the knots that bind psychoanalytic thinking to cultural practices and social processes

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.

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 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’.

Amongst clinical papers, my main publications have concerned race and racism especially in the analytic setting. My book: ‘The Work of Whiteness. A Psychoanalytic Perspective’ was published by Routledge in 2021.

Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He has published numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently “The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’” (Palgrave 2017) and “Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan: On the Blazing Sublime” (edited with Ann Casement and Phil Goss) (Routledge 2020). In 2017, he was the recipient of the Sarton Medal of the University of Ghent (Belgium) for his outstanding contributions to the history of psychoanalysis.

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.

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.

I am a historian who has used psychoanalytic ideas in my published work. Currently I’m working on a history of the German Peasants’ War (1524-6), the biggest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. I’m asking about collective psychology and what makes people engage in revolt; about dreams and transformation; and about gender and revolution – this was a movement of ‘brothers’ that was explicitly masculine in its rhetoric. I’ve also written a biography of the German reformer Martin Luther which drew on psychoanalytic ideas; and I’ve written on the history of witchcraft in Germany. With Daniel Pick I co-edited a collection, Dreams and History.

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.

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.

I recently gained my PhD from the University of Aberdeen, where my research focused on analysing Real Life magazines through a psychosocial lens. The project drew on my extensive experience as a journalist working on various national titles in the tabloid and Real Life magazine genres. My research highlights the distinctive neoliberal agenda that operates through the production and consumption of Real Life magazines, examining their emotional and psychosocial impact on both readers and the broader media environment. I am especially interested in themes of socio-economic and political loss, and I take a psychosocial approach to explore the psychical implications of the genre and its inscription in a particularly classed and gendered form of melancholia. I am currently developing publications on these themes, while also shaping a new research project on mediated images of loss during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I am a historian of subjectivity. My current research is on the history of solitude in Enlightenment Britain. I have published many articles on this topic and am currently writing a book. I have also directed a large Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Pathologies of Solitude’, and am about to be interviews for another on ‘Solitude, Social Inequality and Mental Health’.

Independent Scholar and Employer Engagement Officer for the School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering

Careers and Student Enterprise, University of University of East London

Child and adolescent mental health. Author of three psychoanalytic history books.

I am especially interested in the implications of the psychoanalytic theory of the mind to understand how people experience illness both in themselves and in others. I have published papers on illness narrative as a genre, the contribution of the body to selfhood in development, and most recently on the application of Winnicott’s ideas on ‘holding’ to serious physical illness. I am also an expert on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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’.

I have been a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist for forty years in private practice along with roles as a supervisor and teacher. I am also a novelist writing under the pen name of William Rose and my novels have greatly benefitted from my interest in and experience of psychoanalysis, something that I hope is evident when reading them. In the ‘About the Author’ section of my novels, in reference to my pen name, is the following: “William Rose….has had, for many years, a special interest in both the art of the Symbolist movement and the early development of psychoanalysis, two areas of cultural purpose that in their own very different ways, aimed to free the human psyche from the limitations of repression.”

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 is a Jungian analyst (Society of Analytical Psychology) and senior couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist (Tavistock Relationships). She was a faculty member at Tavistock Relationships (TR), from 2012 to 2020, firstly as clinical lecturer and organiser of conferences and short courses, then Head of the MA/PgDip in Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy and Head of the MSc in Psychosexual and Relationship Therapy, and laterally as Head of Psychoanalytic Training. She continues to supervise on TR’s couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. She is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and writes and reviews for a range of journals. Her interests include the nature of psychic reality and subjectivity, transgenerational transmission of trauma, analytical psychology and couple relationships.

Prof Candida Yates is an interdisciplinary scholar and group practitioner in Psychosocial Studies and its application to media, culture, politics and society, and has published widely in that field. She sits on the Executive Boards of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; she is a Founding Scholar of the BPC and is an Associate of the Freud Museum and works with clinicians, creatives and cultural organisations to create new understandings of emotion in the public sphere. She is Co-Editor of the Routledge book series: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture, and is a Contributing Editor on the journals Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Journal of Psychosocial Studies.

As the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg’s daughter and executor, I have had privileged access to family memories, memorabilia, documents, photographs and a library of Zilboorg’s considerable published work, all of which have informed my recent two-volume biography The Life of Gregory Zilboorg. The Zilboorg archives at the Beinecke Library at Yale also contain important material: Extensive personal correspondence there spans Zilboorg’s experience of family, revolution, the Russian and artistic communities in Mexico, and relationship with my mother from their first meeting in 1940. My scholarly work throughout my career– including editions of letters (between modernist poets H.D. and Richard Aldington), an edition of autobiographical fiction (H.D.’s Bid Me to Live) and a biography (of the historical novelist Mary Renault) as well as a historical novel about H.D., Aldington and their contemporaries (Transgressions: Her Story, His Story, A Love Story, A War Story)– has focused on contextualising twentieth-century figures. Work on H.D., a patient of Freud’s in the 1930s, brought me into contact with spiritual questing and early psychoanalytic thought, while the theoretical nature of modern literary criticism acquainted me with historical developments in psychoanalysis. The research required by my controversial subject stretched my understanding into the history of medicine and religious searching and allowed me to write an important biographical narrative of as much interest to general readers as to those within the fields of Russian history and literature, the First World War, medical history, psychoanalysis and religion. I am currently working on a more personal memoir entitled ‘A Psychoanalytic Childhood’