Brett Kahr at Maresfield Gardens 1986

Brett Kahr at Maresfield Gardens, 1986

Professor Brett Kahr

Honorary Director of Research, Freud Museum London 

Professor Brett Kahr has worked in the mental health profession for over forty years.

A clinical registrant of both the British Psychoanalytic Council and the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, he is Senior Fellow at the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology in London and, also, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalysis and Mental Health at Regent’s University London.

Over the decades, Kahr has worked in the National Health Service and in private practice with both individuals and couples. He is currently Consultant Psychotherapist to The Balint Consultancy in London and, additionally, Consultant in Psychology at The Bowlby Centre. He also serves as Chair of the Scholars Committee of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

In addition to his clinical practice, Kahr has worked as a media psychologist. Formerly Resident Psychotherapist on BBC 2, broadcasting about mental health issues to millions of listeners, he has appeared on over one thousand radio and television programmes. In recognition of his work in this field, he has become Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University. He has endeavoured to integrate his public outreach experience into various professional mental health organisations and has served as Chair of the Media Advisory Group of the British Psychoanalytic Council and, also, as Special Media Adviser and as Chair of the Professional and Public Relations Committee of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, which recently awarded him an Honorary Fellowship for his contributions.

Professor Kahr has enjoyed the privilege of a long-standing relationship with Freud Museum London, having begun to work at Maresfield Gardens in 1986, during its first year of operations, as Deputy Director of the International Campaign for the Freud Museum, helping to launch the museum among psychological practitioners worldwide. Since that time, he has contributed to the museum in a variety of ways, including, most recently, by having served as both a Trustee to Freud Museum London and to Freud Museum Publications from 2011 until 2020. More recently, he has become both Honorary Director of Research and Series Editor of the newly-launched “Freud Museum Monograph Series” in collaboration with Karnac Books.

Summary of Publications and Research

Professor Kahr is the author of sixteen books and series editor of more than seventy-five additional titles on a wide range of subjects.

His solo-authored books cover a range of topics, including clinical investigations of extreme psychopathology and forensic mental health, such as his title, Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel (Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group, 2020), as well as Dangerous Lunatics: Trauma, Criminality, and Forensic Psychotherapy (Confer Books, 2020). He has also written on Sex and the Psyche (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2007) – a Waterstone’s Non-Fiction Bestseller – based on his study of the traumatic roots of over 20,000 adult sexual fantasies, as well as Celebrity Mad: Why Otherwise Intelligent People Worship Fame (Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group, 2020).

A trained historian, he has authored many books on the life and work of Sigmund Freud and on the history of psychoanalysis. These titles include Life Lessons from Freud (Pan Macmillan, 2013), which appeared in the School of Life series on “Life Lessons from Great Thinkers”, as well as Coffee with Freud (Karnac Books, 2017), and, more recently, Freud’s Pandemics: Surviving Global War, Spanish Flu, and the Nazis (Karnac Books, 2021), which originated as one of the Freud Museum London’s first Zoom lectures, designed to help support the organisation shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. He has also written many books on the work of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, including D.W. Winnicott: A Biographical Portrait (Karnac Books, 1996), which received the Gradiva Award for Biography in 1997, as well as the best-selling Tea with Winnicott (Karnac Books, 2016).

Kahr’s books currently in production include a collection of essays on the psychology of the media, entitled How to Be Intimate with 15,000,000 Strangers: Musings on Media Psychoanalysis, and, also, a new intellectual biography of Sigmund Freud, as well as a collection of essays, Unearthing Freud’s Death Bed and Laing’s Missing Tooth: Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis, much of which derives from archival research at the museum.

In addition to his writing of books, Kahr also serves as Consulting Editor to The International Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy and, also, as Consultant Historian to the journal Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, as well as Consultant to the Board of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, the journal of Tavistock Relationships.

Works-in-progress

Kahr’s ongoing clinical research includes his work on the role of unconscious death wishes in the aetiology of severe psychoses and other forms of mental distress, expanding his concepts of both “psychological infanticide” and the “infanticidal attachment”.

His historical research includes his ongoing archival investigation of the life and work of Donald Winnicott, as well as a study of nineteenth-century European psychiatry, attempting to highlight the revolutionary and humane contributions of Sigmund Freud against a backdrop of much medical savagery. A significant proportion of this research derives from both the archives and the library of rare books at Freud Museum London.

Caroline Bainbridge

Emerita Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis

Emerita Professor, University of Roehampton; Faculty, Eco-Leadership Institute; Founding Scholar, British Psychoanalytic Council; Fellow, Royal Society of Arts  

Caroline trained at the Tavistock and Portman Trust to become a qualified organisational consultant who takes a psychodynamic approach to team experience and organisational ecologies. She is an accredited Analytic Network Coach registered with the Eco-Leadership Institute, where she also serves as a faculty member.

After a 27-year academic career, Caroline has recently been appointed as Emerita Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at Roehampton University in London, where she continues to supervise doctoral research projects.

She co-supervises a further PhD at the University of Ulster. Caroline is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and her contribution to psychoanalytic research in the humanities has been recognised in her appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

She is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and she has worked closely with the Freud Museum in London on several conferences and symposia since 2009.

Summary of Publications and Research

Caroline is the author of The Cinema of Lars von Trier (2007) and A Feminine Cinematics (2008), and co-editor of various special journal editions and edited collections including Culture and the Unconscious (2007), Television and Psychoanalysis (2013), and Media and the Inner World (2014).

She has authored many book chapters and articles in journals such as Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, Free Associations (where she was also Editor between 2010-17), Screen, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Celebrity Studies, and Critical Studies in Television.

After focusing on debates about gender, cinema, and the politics of the feminine, Caroline turned her attention to the media as a form of psychological object. Working extensively with object relations psychoanalysis, she has made a major contribution to scholarly interest in its value for understanding individual experience and sociocultural dynamics.

Between 2009-13, in partnership with Professor Candida Yates at Bournemouth University, Caroline directed the Media and the Inner World research network, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. In this role, she curated a series of public engagement events centred on the application of psychoanalysis to popular culture – her longstanding area of interest.

Between 2014-21, Caroline was film section editor at the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She has given invited talks at numerous international associations for psychoanalysis including the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Latin American Federation of Psychoanalysts. She has supervised 10 PhDs to completion and has externally examined 15 doctorates internationally. She is currently supervising 5 additional PhDs.

Works-in-progress

Caroline now works as an executive and personal coach, as well as offering book coaching for budding authors. In her organisational consultancy work with diverse clients from academic, charity, third sector, and commercial settings, she practises using a psychoanalytical approach to group dynamics, cultural imperatives, and the urgent need for social change.

She also provides research consultancy, and she has a special interest in working with cultural and social dynamics, experiences of social and cultural difference, encounters with media and everyday life, and social responsibility. Under her fledgling umbrella agency, Milieu, Caroline is currently designing bespoke learning experiences for a range of organisations and settings and creating critical cultural provocations in the form of short written, video, and audio pieces.  

Gemma Blackshaw

Professor of Art History

Royal College of Art (RCA)

Gemma Blackshaw is an art historian, writer and curator. A specialist in what she has termed the ‘clinical modernism’ of art in Vienna circa 1900, she works on the intersection of modernist portraiture and figuration with clinical medical cultures in early 20th-century Europe.

Feminist archival, curatorial and writing practices which attend to the themes of sickness, care, attention and reparation are central to her research.

She works within the School of Arts & Humanities at the RCA, a postgraduate institution for art and design, often in collaboration with its practice-based researchers in painting, photography and writing.

She started and continues to lead the School’s research group devoted to creative research as a practice of care. She further contributes to the School’s research culture through the supervision and examination of PhD candidates, and the mentoring of early-career researchers.

Summary of Publications and Research

Exhibition and book projects include:

  • The Body Electric: Erwin Osen and Egon Schiele (Leopold Museum, Vienna), an exhibition which brought newly-discovered drawings of electrotherapy patients by Osen authenticated by Blackshaw to a public audience for the first time in their history (2021).
  • CARE(LESS), a co-edited book with Sharon Kivland on creative research methods as means of caring with contributions from postgraduate researchers at the RCA, published as a supplement to ON CARE by Ma Bibliothèque (2021).
  • Contribution of research to Taschen’s ‘landmark’ (600-page) monograph on Egon Schiele, The Complete Painting, 1909–1918, edited by Tobias Natter and published in 4 languages (2017).
  • Contribution of research to the exhibition catalogue for Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude (Courtauld Gallery, London), which reinserted Schiele’s explicit work on paper within fierce contemporaneous debates on the pornographic image, and on the Modernist ‘contempt’ of the legislation on its creation and dissemination in early 20th-century Vienna (2014-15).
  • The Nakeds (Drawing Room, London), an exhibition and catalogue which considered contemporary artists’ engagement with the value-laden questions Schiele’s work continues to raise about the distinctions between art and pornography (2014).
  • Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (National Gallery, London), a major exhibition and catalogue for the Sainsbury Wing on the ‘New Viennese’ contribution to portraiture through the years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (2013).
  • Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a co-edited book with Sabine Wieber on modernist artists and writers lived experiences of mental illness, journeys to and from the Empire’s state psychiatric institutions and private sanatoria for nervous ailments, and metaphorical crossings in and out of ‘madness’ (2012).
  • Madness & Modernity (Wellcome Collection, London; Wien Museum, Vienna), a major exhibition and catalogue which charted the intersection of modernist art, architecture and design with mental illness and psychiatry in Vienna circa 1900 (2009–10).
Works-in-progress
  • Clinical Modernism: Art, Medicine and Experience in Vienna 1900, a single-authored, book-length examination of how Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Koloman Moser transformed the pursuit of clinical knowledge into the search for artistic ‘truth’, producing the radical representations of the body that have come to signify the birth of modernism in the visual arts in early 20th-century Vienna.
  • I care by… a co-edited slim volume of work produced by the Care research group at the RCA and artist Jade Montserrat on creative research as a practice of care for the Research Communiqués series developed within the School of Arts & Humanities (forthcoming, May 2022).
  • Sick Women Correspondents: Practices of Care in Cross-historical Love Letter Writing, a collaborative writing and performance project with art historian, writer and theorist Alice Butler on correspondence in and across time as a creative mode of research and an always-relational practice of care.
  • Discovering L. A., a collaborative writing project with literary translator Natasha Lehrer on a recently discovered novel by one of Schiele’s life models, which engages both critically and experimentally with the archive, with historiography, with art history, with translation, and with academic writing in order to recover the author differently, ‘re-visioning’ her representation by others as well as by herself in her own writing.

 

Stephen FroshStephen Frosh

Professor

Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

Stephen Frosh is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies (which he founded) at Birkbeck, University of London. He was Pro-Vice-Master of Birkbeck from 2003 to 2017.

He has a background in academic and clinical psychology and was Consultant Clinical Psychologist and latterly Vice Dean at the Tavistock Clinic, London, throughout the 1990s, specialising in family and individual psychotherapy with children and young people.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a Founding Member of the Association of Psychosocial Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute of Group Analysis.

He is Visiting Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Summary of Publications and Research

Stephen Frosh is the author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis.

His books include Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (2013), Feelings (2011), A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory (2012), Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic (2010), Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (2005), For and Against Psychoanalysis (2006), After Words (2002), The Politics of Psychoanalysis (1999), Sexual Difference (1994), Identity Crisis (1991) and Young Masculinities (co-authored with Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman, 2002).

His most recent book is Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness, published by Palgrave in 2019. Edited books include Brazilian Psychosocial Histories of Psychoanalysis (2021) and New Voices in Psychosocial Studies (2019). He is co-editor of the Springer Handbook of Psychosocial Studies.

Works-in-progress

Stephen Frosh’s current research interests are in processes of acknowledgement and recognition after social violence and in questions of social and ethnic identity.

His many PhD students are working on a range of psychoanalytic and psychosocial issues, clustering around social identities, contemporary subjectivities and histories of psychoanalysis. A work in progress is a new book on antisemitism, racism and psychoanalysis.

Joanne MorraDr Joanne Morra

Professor of Art and Culture

Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Joanne is also a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Council’s Scholars’ Network; Member of the AHRC Peer Review College; Advisory Board of New Formations; and Board Member of Nida Doctoral School.

Joanne Morra is Professor of Art and Culture at Central Saint Martins. Committed to art education, she has taught fine art students over the past 25 years. Her research and publications focus on artistic and psychoanalytic practices as personal, social, and political forces of individual and collective transformation.

Joanne studied at the University of Leeds (PhD in Art History and Theory, and MA in Feminism and the Visual Arts), and before that at the University of Toronto (MA in History of Art, and BA Hons in History of Art and English).

Joanne joined Central Saint Martins in 2001 as the BA Fine Art Co-ordinator for Historical and Theoretical Studies (2001-9), and in 2014 co-founded The Doctoral Platform at CSM, then in 2018 co-founded with Judy Willcocks the research network ‘Creative Practices, Education and Wellbeing’. Joanne supervises PhD students and continues to teach on the Art Programme.

Summary of Publications and Research

Joanne’s research and publications are located at the intersections of contemporary art, feminism, autobiography, and psychoanalysis. Taking a psycho-social view of art and psychotherapy her work contributes to our understanding of the psycho-somatic aspects of subjectivity, and the political power of artistic practice.

Joanne has published widely in this area, including her most recent book Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art (2018). She has also published many articles on the emotional and affective feelings of making and encountering contemporary art such as experiences of intimacy, trauma, loss, anxiety and crying; as well as art’s contribution to our understanding of psychoanalytic processes and techniques, such as working-through, transference, potential space, use, and afterwardsness.

Joanne has founded two journals and edited many volumes. She is Founding Principal Editor of Journal of Visual Culture (2000 – present), and guest edited two of its issues, 50 Years of ‘Art and Objecthood’: Traces, Impact, Critique with Alison Green (2017) and Acts of Translation with Mieke Bal (2007).

Joanne’s collaborative project with Emma Talbot entitled Intimacy Unguarded culminated in a special issue of Journal of Visual Art Practice (2017).

As Founder and Editor of the cultural studies and philosophy journal Parallax (1995-2000) she co-edited with Marquard Smith a series of volumes on French philosophy, feminism, post-colonial theory, dreams, and the politics of translation.

Joanne’s research has been funded by: Arts Council of England, AHRB, The Leverhulme Trust; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Commonwealth Scholarship Commission; Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Works-in-progress

Joanne is working on two projects:

First, she is spending 6 months reading a host of recently published auto-theoretical/-historical/-fictional books written by (mainly) women (of colour).

Thereafter, Joanne will return to her book, In the Studio and On the Couch: Art, Autobiography and Psychoanalysis in which she provides a sustained encounter between contemporary art, psychotherapy, feminism, and women’s representations of their lived experience in times of personal, political and social crisis, change and equilibrium.

Dany NobusDany Nobus

Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology

Brunel University London

Dany Nobus obtained a BSc in Psychology, an MSc in Clinical Psychology, an MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Ghent, Belgium. He completed his training as a psychoanalyst in Belgium and France.

In 1996, he was appointed as a Lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University London, where he was subsequently promoted to a personal Chair in Psychoanalytic Psychology in 2006. At Brunel University London, he has also been the Head of the School of Social Sciences from 2006 until 2012 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Strategy, Development and External Relations from 2012 until 2017.

Between 2014 and 2018, he was the Chair of the Freud Museum London and over the years he has held Visiting Professorships in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts—Boston and in Psychiatry at Creighton University in Omaha NE.

At present, he is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London, Fellow of the Freud Museum London, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and a psychoanalyst in private practice. In 2017, he was presented with the Sarton Medal of the University of Ghent for his outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic historiography.

Summary of Publications and Research

Dany Nobus has published 9 books and over 250 articles, chapters and review essays in academic and professional outlets.

His main research interests are the history, theory, and practice of psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, the interface between psychoanalysis, philosophy and the arts, and the history of ideas with special reference to the Renaissance and Early Modern periods.

He has made numerous contributions to the study of Lacanian psychoanalysis and published important historical works on the life and ideas of Sigmund Freud and the early years of the psychoanalytic movement.

Most recently, he has edited (with Ann Casement and Phil Goss) a volume on the confluence between Lacanian and Jungian thought (Thresholds and Pathways between Jung and Lacan: On the Blazing Sublime, Routledge 2021) and a collection of scholarly essays examining crucial questions in Lacanian psychoanalysis (Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Studies in Lacanian Theory and Practice, Routledge 2022).

At Brunel University London, he was for many years the convenor of an MA Programme in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society, and he has supervised more than 30 PhD students, many of whom have become established academics in their own right.

Over the past 25 years, he has delivered more than 300 lectures, seminars and workshops around the world, contributed to various psychoanalytic training programmes on both sides of the Atlantic, and been instrumental in the creation of new centres for psychoanalysis in the US and New Zealand.

In addition, he sits on the Advisory Board of the Psychoanalytic Horizons book series from Bloomsbury, and is a member of the editorial board of various psychoanalytic journals.

Alongside his academic and clinical work, he has contributed to a wide range of radio and television broadcasts in the UK, the US and France, including the highly successful episode on Freud for the BBC series ‘Genius of the Modern World’.

Works-in-progress

At present, Dany Nobus is completing a book chapter on nature, atheism, and materialism in 18th century France for an edited volume on the influence of Marquis de Sade’s works on the modernist movement, and a chapter on money and symbolic economies in psychoanalysis for the 3-volume Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money.

In addition, he is completing a monograph entitled Freud in the Margins: Rethinking the History of Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press) and pursuing research for an intellectual biography of Theodor Reik (Routledge), a detailed commentary on Jacques Lacan’s 1974 text (and broadcast) Television (Northwestern University Press), and a new, full-scale, in-depth biography of Lacan (Reaktion Books/The University of Chicago Press).

Raluca Soreanu at the Freud MuseumRaluca Soreanu

Professor

Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK; Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalyst, member of Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, and Reader in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.

Her work sits at the intersection of psychosocial studies, psychoanalysis, social theory, and medical humanities. She has a particular interest in the social, political and cultural applications of psychoanalysis.

In the past five years, she studied the Michael Balint Archive, found at the British Psychoanalytical Society. Between 2016 and 2020, she held a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Medical Humanities at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck. Between 2017 and 2019, she was part of the team of the collaborative Wellcome Trust project, ‘Waiting Times’.

Raluca serves as the Editor of the Journal of the Balint Society.

She has a longstanding collaboration with the Freud Museum London, where she has taught a series of courses on the work of Sándor Ferenczi.

Summary of Publications and Research

Raluca Soreanu’s research has several strands. The first strand looks at the social life of psychic fragments. She is interested in the way collective trauma and psychic splitting are entangled with collective creativity, mourning and recognition. Her monograph, Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Recognition and Denial in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) proposes a trauma theory and a theory of recognition, in dialogue with Sándor Ferenczi.

A second strand of her research is in the medical humanities, focusing on the intersection between medical and psychoanalytic epistemologies. She investigates this intersection through a particular instance of psychoanalysis outside the clinic, the Balint groups tradition. Her project is a multi-method social history of Balint groups, where she asks two questions: how can we understand this complex psychoanalysis-medicine conversation and what can psychoanalysis offer medicine, with respect to making sense of illness?

A third strand is dedicated to free psychoanalytic clinics. She is interested in collective projects in psychoanalysis that open psychoanalytic spaces to excluded or marginal individuals or groups. In 2021, she co-organised (with Joanna Ryan and Ivan Ward) a conference in two parts, ‘Psychoanalysis for the People’ (Freud Museum). She is leading the five-year interdisciplinary project ‘Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for our Times’ (FREEPSY), which will show the political life of free clinics and other invisible or little-known psychoanalytic spaces.

Raluca’s work has been published in journals such as The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis & History, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, American Imago, Studies in the Maternal.

Works-in-progress

At present, Raluca Soreanu is working on a theoretical-clinical monograph, The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, Relational Psychoanalysis Series).

Her co-authored book Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (with Jakob Staberg and Jenny Willner) will be published by Leuven University Press (Figures of the Unconscious Series) in January 2023. It approaches the themes of trauma and catastrophe in Ferenczi from a psychoanalytic, philosophical and literary theory perspective.

She is also working on a monograph titled Thinking in Dyads: On Michael Balint and Countertransference, and co-editing two volumes, which will contribute to a ‘Balint revival’ in psychoanalysis: Bálint Mihály for Our Times: The Budapest Years, and Michael Balint for Our Times: The London Years (with Judit Szekacs, Tom Keve and Ivan Ward).

As the Editor of the Journal of the Balint Society, she recently edited a special issue on the theme ‘Covid-19 and the Virtual Group’ (February 2021).

Neil VickersNeil Vickers

Professor of English Literature and the Health Humanities

King’s College London

I am an academic specialising in the links between literature and medicine from the early modern period to the present day.

In addition to a literary training, I worked for many years in epidemiology and public health. I have a special interest in the ways in which psychoanalysis can illuminate the lived experience of physical illness and have published widely on psychoanalytic psychosomatics.

I codirect the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London and I work closely with members of the Institut La Personne en Médecine at the University of Press.

Summary of Publications and Research

My major contribution to date has been made in the field of Romantic literary studies. I am the author of Coleridge and the Doctors (Oxford University Press, 2004) and I have published widely on Coleridge’s engagement with the German ‘psychological’ tradition of the eighteenth century.

More recently I have been preoccupied by the contribution bodily experience makes to selfhood. The interplay at the level of lived experience between the psychological and the physical is a primary focus for anthropologists of psychiatry and for theorists of narrative-based medicine; but it has received scant attention from literary scholars, even though literary autobiography is potentially an important source of information about that relationship. My work attempts to demonstrate its value. To that end, I draw on the work of Winnicott most especially but also Bion and the post-Bionians.

Recent publications include an attempt to extend Winnicott’s notion of ‘holding’ to show how it might be applied to the management of serious physical illness in adults and psychoanalytical readings of a range of contemporary illness memoirs. 

Works-in-progress

I am currently completing a book (with Derek Bolton) called Shared Life and the Experience of Illness. A major diagnosis changes how others see us, in ways that are difficult to control. Few if any relationships remain the same. Relations with intimate others often become closer as we become more dependent on them; more distant contacts become more strained; and if the illness is visible even relations with complete strangers may become fraught.

If you are diagnosed with a major disease, you are likely to be dropped by at least some of your friends and acquaintances. If you’re lucky, you will find that while people in the middle distance move away, intimate others draw nearer.

Shared Life is a transdisciplinary work so in addition to psychoanalytic theory, we also draw upon evolutionary theory, neuroscience, microsociology, epidemiology and epigenetics. We hope it will appear in 2023.

Candida YatesProfessor Candida Yates

Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University

Bournemouth University (Dept, Humanities and Law, Faculty of Media and Communication); Fellow of Royal Society of Arts; Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council and member of the BPC Scholars Network Steering Group; Trustee and Member and of the Executive Board for the Association for Psychosocial Studies; Director on the Board for the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society

Candida Yates is Professor of Culture and Communications at Bournemouth University and previously she spent many years working in the Psychosocial Studies subject area at the University of East London.

She is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, teacher and group practitioner and applies psychosocial and cultural theories and methods to culture, politics and society and has published and communicated widely in that field. Her media appearances include Swedish Television and CBC Radio, BBC Radio4, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

She works with psychotherapy practitioners and scholars to create new understandings of emotion and affect in the public sphere and this psychosocial focus informs her research and professional practice. She has worked with groups to explore the changing emotional landscape of Brexit and more recently has researched the affective responses to women political leaders at a time of crisis.

She teaches psychodynamic understandings of political culture on the Masters programmes: Political Psychology and International Political Communication at Bournemouth University where she also supervises Doctoral students.

She is Director of the BU Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice, and was previously Co-Director (with Prof Caroline Bainbridge) of the research network, Media and the Inner World (funded by the AHRC 2009-13) and now jointly edits a Routledge book series: ‘Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture’ that emerged from that network.   

Summary of Publications and Research

Candida Yates has made substantial contribution to the psychoanalysis of culture, politics and society and her publications include: The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity (2015); Masculine Jealousy and Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave, 2007). Co-edited books: Media and the Inner World: Psycho-Cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2014); Television and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2013); Emotion: New Psychosocial Perspectives (Palgrave, 2009); Culture and The Unconscious (Palgrave, 2007).

Recent journal articles include: Yates & MacRury (2021) ‘Empathy an impossible task: Engaging with groups in a troubling Brexit landscape’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society; Yates & Crociani-Windland (2020) ‘Masculinity, affect and the search for certainty in an age of precarity’, Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics; Yates (2019) “Show us you care!” The gendered psycho-politics of emotion and women as political leaders, European Journal of Politics and Gender; Yates (2019) ‘The psychodynamics of casino culture and politics’, Journal of Psychosocial Studies.

She is Joint Editor of the Routledge books series: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture, and Contributing Editor on the journals: Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Journal of Psychosocial Studies and a member of the British Psychoanalytic Council Editorial Board for New Associations.

Works-in-progress

Candida Yates is currently working on projects that focus on the feelings and fantasies stirred up within the psycho-political and cultural landscape of the UK and beyond. This includes research that examines the ways in which the re-animation of an English maritime consciousness is shaping cultural identity and the national imaginary at a time of great uncertainty and change within a post Brexit, pandemic and climate emergency context.

She is also working with film maker Dr Sue Sudbury on a psychosocial participatory arts project that explores climate activism for teenagers in the Purbeck in partnership with the National Trust and the Psychology Climate Alliance.

In addition, she is conducting research into the feelings and cultural fantasies that shape perceptions of women in positions of leadership and is writing a monograph: Political Leadership and the Psycho-Cultural Imagination ( Routledge, 2022).