The BPC marks International Women’s Day 2025
Together, let's #AccelerateAction for gender equality.
For over 100 years, International Women’s Day (IWD) has been an opportunity to focus on the issues that are still impacting women and raise awareness about discrimination. Each year, this awareness day looks to celebrate women’s achievements and works towards a world where difference is valued and celebrated and where gender equality is achieved. This International Women’s Day, the 2025 Theme is ‘Accelerate Action’, so today we’re marking IWD by celebrating female therapists, thinkers and artists that have accelerated psychoanalytic thought. Whilst in psychoanalysis, progress isn’t always linear, these prominent female figures expanded upon psychoanalytic ways of thinking, expressing and communicating in the public sphere.
Explore our resources below collated from our magazine New Associations, our flagship conference PPNow and from wider, within our professional community, that spotlight female figures that investigate psychoanalytic concepts through art, words, research and more.
Resources
“Klein was of course wrong about the survival of her legacy. Many of her concepts have crept, knowingly or unknowingly, into the psychoanalytic lexicon.”
Click here & visit page 5 to read Jane Milton’s look back on Melanie Klein’s legacy and impact on psychoanalytic theory. She invites readers to explore the richly resourced Melanie Klein Trust website for further ideas, reading and learning resources around Klein.
“In the 255 years long existence of the Royal Academy, 2023 marked the first time there was a major exhibition by a female artist, suggesting that the academy had thought the art world had little to see from female artists before or that this retrospective of Marina Abramovic’s work was an exception. Perhaps both.”
Click here & visit page 31 to read Michaela Chamberlain’s review of the RA Marina Abramović retrospective where she discusses the performance artists’ legacy of physical art that often challenged our assumptions around gender.
Our head of Professional Practice, Joanne Brooks, recommends the book Female Experience: Four Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women.
Female Experience presents contributions from twenty female psychoanalysts representing four generations, encompassing differing psychoanalytic traditions within the British Psychoanalytical Society, discussing their experiences in working with women. This book was co-edited by Joan Raphael-Leff who won a BPC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024. The book was also co-edited by Rosine J. Perelberg.
Our head of Professional Practice, Joanne Brooks, also recommends the more recent book, Independent Women in British Psychoanalysis: Creativity and Authenticity at Work.
This work celebrates the lives and work of female psychoanalysts whose significant contributions to the Independent Tradition have hitherto been overshadowed by their male counterparts.
“When you actually put a Black body out in the English countryside, you’re troubling something quite deeply held within the English psyche.”
For Black History Month 2024, we invited Marchelle Farrell, author of Uprooting, to discuss her book with Helen Morgan, ex-Editor of New Associations. Read the conversation here which spans topics of colonialism, gardening, whiteness and climate change.
Visit the Freud Museum’s dazzling new exhibition that highlights the women who helped Freud invent psychoanalysis and their legacy in its practice – as well as in the arts and literature through to our own time.
For International Women’s Day 2025, we’re making a talk from our 2022 PPNow Conference available to view. Watch below to listen to New Associations Co-Editor Noreen Giffney’s presentation on ‘Grappling with Uncertainty: Thoughts and Thinking about Sexuality and Gender in the Consulting Room’.
The Co-Editors from our magazine New Associations, Emmanuelle Smith and Noreen Giffney, have recommended a few resources that spotlight many accomplished women in the psychoanalytic sphere:
NA recommends:
“There’s something about being driven by a sense inside us, that we want to do something, we want to go somewhere.”
Watch this in conversation with Dr Gail Lewis, a psychodynamic psychotherapist and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for ‘Black Question Time, The Call of Success’, a series of interviews by Birkbeck University with inspirational people of colour.
“Taking care of time is the most vital thing to do.”
Listen to this podcast with Professor Lisa Baraitser, a psychoanalyst and Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck. In this conversation Professor Baraitser discusses her book Enduring Time where she draws on a wide range of artistic, political, cultural, and psychoanalytic objects, to address how we might meaningfully engage with ‘the time of our times’.
“We’re all the product of multiple influences, many of which we’re not aware of.”
Watch this In conversation with Professor Sasha Roseneil about her life, achievements and career path. Professor Roseneil is a BPC Founding Scholar, a group analyst and the first female Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex.
