Louise Braddock, Director of the IPT Network

For a comprehensive list of my publications, please visit my academia.edu page.

I research across the two disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis, working with members of the London Philosophy-Psychoanalysis Group and with psychoanalytic colleagues in London and Sydney. I work on explaining concepts central to psychoanalysis: identification, ‘empathy’ and sympathy in the social sciences; imagination; the counter-transference in the psychoanalytic process; the philosophical understanding of clinical psychoanalytic observation; processes of psychic construction in the individual and mechanisms of transmission between the individual and society.

I originally trained as a psychiatrist, then became a philosopher, gaining my PhD from the University of Reading in 2000. Between 2006 and 2017 I was a Bye-Fellow at Girton College at the University of Cambridge where I taught philosophy. I lectured on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychoanalysis and also attended the long-standing Cambridge Psychoanalysis Reading Group. I am an associate member of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Oxford where I formerly taught and lectured on the philosophy of social science. Also in Oxford, since 2005 I have co-convened (with Paul Tod and more recently Niall Gildea) the Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis in the St John’s College Research Centre.

I co-founded the London Philosophy-Psychoanalysis Group with David Bell and Richard Rusbridger from the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1999 and was a founder member of INSEI (2013-2019) an interdisciplinary network on sympathy/empathy and imagination. From 2011 to 2020 I was the Director of Research for the Independent Social Research Foundation, which funds social science research.