Valerie Sinason

Valerie Sinason PhD, born in 1946, is a poet, writer and child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst (retired) . She is the granddaughter of refugees . She is President of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability , Founder and Patron of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, Hon Consultant Psychoanalyst at the University of Cape Town Child Guidance Clinic, on the Board of the ISSTD, the editorial team of the ESTD and chair of the trustees for the Bushman Heritage Centre. She was a former consultant at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trusts, the Anna Freud Centre and St George’s Hospital Medical School.

She has specialised on trauma, disability, dissociation and torture all her working life and her maternal grandmother was illiterate and had a mild intellectual disability due to trauma. Before Covid she lectured in person nationally and internationally - particularly South Africa, America and Scandinavia. She has published over 400 poems, papers and chapters and written or co-edited 18 books.

Having retired from clinical work at 70 she devotes more time to writing now- chapters, poems, work books and her first novel due in April from Aeon books.