Biographies



Sudhir Kakar


Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst, novelist, and a scholar in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion. He has been Lecturer at Harvard University, Research Fellow at Harvard Business School, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Study of World Religions at Harvard (2001-02), as also Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago (1989-92), McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii and Vienna. He was also a Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton and Berlin and Fellow at Centre for Advanced Study in Humanities at University of Cologne. Dr. Kakar was in private psychoanalytic practice in New Delhi for 25 years before moving to his current place of residence in Goa, India. He is on the board of many journals and the Freud Archives, Washington. His many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship, and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country’s highest civilian honour. Kakar is the author of eighteen books of non-fiction and five of fiction. His latest books are the selection The Essential Sudhir Kakar (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Young Tagore: The makings of a genius (Penguin-Viking, 2013). His books have been translated into twenty-two languages around the world.

Sverre Varvin


M.D., Dr. Philos. Sverre Varvin is training and supervising analyst, Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society; Professor, University College of Oslo and Akershus; Psychoanalyst in private practice. Main research areas: traumatisation and treatment of traumatised patients, treatment process, traumatic dreams, transcultural psychology and psychoanalytic training. Human rights: projects in Turkey, Balkans, China. Chair of the IPA China Committee. Has worked for more than 12 years in China with psychotherapy and psychoanalysis training programs.


Mariano Horenstein


Mariano Horenstein is a training analyst who belongs to IPA and works in Argentina. He's the chief editor of Calibán, the official Journal of the Latin American Psychoanalytical Federation. He usually publishes and lectures in many Latin American countries and has won some international prizes as M. Bergwerk (about the clinic forms of Evil), Lucien Freud (about Psychoanalysis and Culture), Elise Hayman Award for the study of Holocaust and Genocide (given by the IPA) and A. Garma (given by the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry).

Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor


Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor is “exceptional class” professor in the University Sorbonne Paris City (Diderot-Paris 7) from 1971 and has been for 12 years the director of the “School of Researches in psychoanalysis”. She is Training Analyst in the Fourth Group in France, a Freudian association created in 1969. Her formation is both in philosophy (Aggregation in philosophy) and in psychopathology (State Doctorate habilitating in direction of researches in Letters and Human Sciences). She is chief editor of scientific review in psychoanalysis: “Topique” (www.revue-topique.org) and president of the International Association for Interactions of Psychoanalysis (A2IP) (www.a2i- psychanalyse.org). The major axis of her researches is Sublimation and thought processes, Criminology and Politics, religious and cultural facts. She published more than 100 scientific papers in various reviews, in French or other languages and 18 books, some translated in several languages.

Maria Teresa Savio Hooke


She is a training analyst with the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. As Scientific Secretary and President of the Australian Society, she contributed to raise the public profile of psychoanalysis and to promote exchanges with mental health professionals and the humanities. As member of the IPA China Committee, she co-organized the first IPA Centenary Conference in Beijing (2010) and contributed to foster closer connections between psychoanalytic groups and societies in Asia. As chair for Europe of the IPA Committee on Ageing, she collaborated with IPSO on the theme of the ageing candidates and the implications for the future of psychoanalysis.  She edited with Salman Akhtar The Geography of Meanings. Psychoanalytic perspectives on place, space, land and dislocation (2007). She contributed to the volume The Empty Couch (2013) with the paper The Ageing  candidate: Will the empty couch become an empty institute?  She is co-editor with Sverre  Varvin and Alf Gerlach of Psychoanalysis in Asia: China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan ( 2013). She is currently Chair of the International New Groups.     She was awarded in the Order of the Star from the Italian President of the Republic in 2009 for services to psychoanalysis in Australia.


Gohar Homayounpour


Dr. Gohar Homayounpour, was born in Paris to Iranian parents, she was educated in North America (Canada and United States), she now lives and works in Tehran. She is Training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, where she is founder and director. Lecturer at ShahidBeheshti University, Tehran, Iran. Homayounpour has published various psychoanalytic articles, including in the International and Canadian journal of psychoanalysis. Her recent book Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, the MIT Press August 2012, won the Gradiva award for the best psychoanalytic book of the year, and it has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Turkish. Homayounpour is a member of the board at the Freud museum in Vienna.

Fethi Benslama


Fethi Benslama is psychoanalyst, professor of psychopathology and a dean of the department of Psychoanalysis studies, and Humanities Institute of Paris, University Paris-Diderot. His is member of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts. Author of several works in psychoanalysis, on Islam and Europe in the contemporary period, which:  La guerre des subjectivités en islam, Paris, Lignes, 2014; Soudain la révolution, Paris Denoël, Tunis CERES, 2011; Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, University Of Minnesota Press, Menneapolis, 2009; Déclaration  d’insoumission, à l’usage des musulmans et de ceux qui ne le sont pas, Flammarion 2005; La virilité en Islam (avec N. Tazi, ouvrage collectif) éd. de l’Aube, 2004; L’islam à l’épreuve de la psychanalyse, Paris, Aubier, 2002; Poche Flammarion (2004); Une fiction troublante, éd. de l'Aube, 1994; La nuit brisée, Ramsay, Paris, 1988.

Fakhry Davids


Fakhry Davids is a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists. He trained as a clinical psychologist in South Africa, and has had an active interest in the psychology of racism. He is in full-time clinical practice and teaches, supervises and lectures widely. He is a founding board member of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA), which adapts the group relations method to process the aftermath of mass atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba.