Prof. Robert Douglas Hinshelwood

Professor Robert Douglas Hinshelwood qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1976. He took up the post of Consultant Psychotherapist at St Bernard's Hospital in London (now St Bernard's Wing, Ealing Hospital). He was Clinical Director of the Cassel Hospital in Richmond, between 1993-1997.

In 1984 he founded the British Journal of Psychotherapy, and edited it for ten years. In 1999 he founded the Journal Psychoanalysis and History. Around this time he became part of the Free Associations Group (founded by Bob Young and others) which ran the Journal Free Associations, and with Mike Rustin at the University of East London put on 'Psychoanalysis and Public Sphere' conferences in the 1990s.

He published A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, and Clinical Klein in 1994. Both books were widely translated, and influenced the development of Kleinian ideas within international psychoanalysis (this recognised by the Melanie Klein Trust). He has pursued an interest in the application of psychoanalytic ideas in social science, and especially concerning mental health institutions (Thinking about Institutions and Suffering Insanity; and published, with Wilhelm Skogstad Observing Organisations, a psychoanalytic observation method for exposing unconscious dynamics in social organisations.

He retired from the NHS in 1997. He became Professor at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. In 2012, he was Visiting Professor at the Committee for Social Thought, University of Chicago. More recently, after more than a decade of teaching research methodology to postgraduates and research students, he published Research on the Couch; Single Case Studies, Subjectivity and Psychoanalytic Knowledge which addresses the complications of experiments and evidence in the 'subjective science' of psychoanalysis.

On October, 2019 Professor Hinshelwood was presented with the TUMS Distinguished Visiting Professor Title for the duration of 2019-2022 by Head of Psychotherapy Department, TUMS School of Medicine.

• Application of psychoanalysis to social sciences

• Psychoanalytic Ethics

• Epistemology and Methodology of Psychoanalytic Studies

• Therapeutic communities

• Group dynamics

• History of psychoanalysis