What is a Lacanian psychoanalyst?

Lacanian psychoanalysis is the strand that follows Jacques Lacan's return to Freud. It gives particular weight to speech and the emergence of the unconscious through free association, dreams and slips of the tongue.

How does expressive arts therapy work alongside psychoanalysis?

Expressive arts therapy offers a second route into self-expression alongside psychoanalysis. Expressive Arts moves between drawing, movement, sound, drama and writing rather than settling in any one of them. Speech is not the easiest route for everyone, and there is no reason it has to be. Drawing or writing or making something are other ways into self-expression within an analytic practice.

Psychoanalytic Practice & Research

Q: What is psychoanalytic infant observation?

In the Tavistock tradition of infant observation, an observer visits the same family each week over a long period, writes up notes, and brings them to a small seminar. The observation teaches an analyst how emotional life takes shape in the early years, within a family.

I am undergoing formation as a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

I currently work online, with adults in India and elsewhere. In-person sessions can be arranged in Mumbai.

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What formation means

Analysts prefer to say formation rather than training. The word is borrowed from the French, where it means education, but it keeps the older meaning of giving form to something. Training is what a person completes within an institution. Formation is a deeper change that a person undergoes: one’s own analysis, clinical work under supervision, and years of reading in the company of others. The doctorate I am undertaking is part of my formation, as is everything set out below.

Lacanian psychoanalysis is the strand that follows Jacques Lacan’s return to Freud. It gives particular weight to speech and emergence of the unconscious through free association, dreams, slips of the tongue and so on.

Doctoral research

I am undertaking doctoral work in psychoanalysis through GCAS Dublin. The research develops an interest I have carried for some years: the intersection between Lacanian psychoanalytic technique and creative arts interventions.

Expressive arts therapy

I am completing a Diploma in Expressive Arts Therapy from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai (expected in September 2026). Expressive Arts moves between drawing, movement, sound, drama and writing rather than settling in any one of them.

What it brings to analytic work is a second route into self-expression. Speech is not the easiest route for everyone, and there is no reason it has to be. In my practice, drawing or writing or making something are other ways into self-expression.

Clinical and pre-clinical training

With the Psychoanalytic Therapy and Research Centre (PTRC) in Mumbai, I completed a Psychoanalytic Infant Observation and a Young Child Observation, both in the Tavistock tradition. In this method an observer visits the same family each week over a long period, writes up notes, and brings them to a small seminar. The observation teaches an analyst how emotional life takes shape in the early years, within a family.

I also completed PTRC’s Pre-Clinical Training Program in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, which covered developmental theory, unconscious processes in childhood and adolescence, and the foundations of psychoanalytic clinical work.

I am in analysis, and I discuss my clinical work in regular supervision.

More about my background.

Seminars and study

For a year I attended P-HOLE, a seminar series given over to critical and liberatory approaches to psychoanalysis. P-HOLE is not a training institute. It is a collective of clinicians, scholars and artists committed to rigorous study, and to a psychoanalytic practice that is non-discriminatory and community-oriented. A good part of my theoretical grounding comes from that year.

Research and writing

I presented a paper at the Freudian Research Seminar Series 2025 at the Freud Museum London, online, on the psychoanalytic function of Instagram reels in women’s emotional lives.

I also write essays. Waiting, published by Asia Art Archive, is about tending to plants, creative repetitions, and the last few minutes of a session. Anyone who would rather know how I think than where I trained will find more of it there than on this page.

Abstract

On most days I stay in touch with my women friends through the exchange of Instagram reels, interspersed with brief messages noting our reactions to them. The clips run from two to sixty seconds. They resemble sketch comedy, and their subjects range from love and motherhood to animals and food. Their makers often appear tired, in pyjamas, or in the middle of something entirely ordinary.

Reading these reels through Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, I propose that they perform a psychoanalytic function, making certain painful aspects of women’s emotional lives more digestible. Their private exchange is also communicative: it allows women to say things that would be censored in ordinary conversation. Through humour, everyday despair and ambivalence are made speakable. I draw on Bion’s reverie and alpha function to consider how a reel might contain and process an everyday emotional experience. Social media is usually discussed in terms of its harms. This paper takes up a more generative dimension of digital life.

Working with me

I do not give advice or generic solutions. I help you arrive at your own way of dealing with the challenges you might be facing. If speaking is difficult, I would also invite you to write or make art instead.

The first consultation is free, takes place online, and runs between thirty and fifty minutes. Questions about how the work goes are answered on the frequently asked questions page.