I work in person in Oxford and online. I work with adults of all ages suffering from all sorts of psychological and psychosomatic symptoms and forms of distress. These include the effects of anxiety, depression, complex bereavement, damaged confidence, difficulties in relationships, worries about sexual life, creative and work-related troubles, and chronic pain.

I have a background in the humanities. I hold a DPhil in English Literature from Oxford and went on to teach there and at a number of other universities, closing my academic career as Reader at the University of Kent. I was for twelve years an editor of Oxford Literary Review. The last issue of OLR I edited was Ext: Writing Extinction in 2019. I remain a founding editor of the wide-ranging theoretical humanities journal Angelaki and edited two special issues: Home and Family and Hotel Psychoanalysis. Now I am a full-time psychoanalytic psychotherapist, I still write and engage in academic events. My next publication will be in a special issue of Política común.

Reading and writing, like psychotherapy, are ways of picking up vital signs that have gone unnoticed. They make it possible to say things that have not yet been said, or need saying again. They can bring people together and help them discover themselves and how they want to live.

 
 
 
 

  • I am a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, the College of Psychoanalysts and an accredited member of UKCP . I completed my psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at The Guild of Psychotherapists. I am an EMDR practitioner and a member of the UK EMDR association. The UKCP provides an ethical framework I am obliged to abide by and my clinical work is professionally supervised.

    I have offered individual therapy in private practice; at the Guild of Psychotherapists Reduced-fee Clinic; at the Charter clinic, where I also co-facilitated a regular psychotherapy group, and in the NHS.

  • TELEPHONE

    07866 439952

    EMAIL

    sw@sarahwoodpsychotherapy.com

My DPhil and first book were on the poet Robert Browning. Henry James said that ‘none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd.’ I published numerous articles, a monograph on Derrida’s 1967 collection Writing and Difference, a collaborative experimental book called Blue Guitar and a collection of essays called Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces. I’ve often been part of informal study groups unhappy with the status quo and wanting to be part of making things different. At Oxford I joined a reading group to study closely the writings of Jacques Derrida, whose thinking and writing on psychoanalysis and everything else remain essential to me. I started to read psychoanalytic stuff — independently and in a group my friend’s mum called The Freud Squad. We would read these texts aloud and listen to them, albeit in translation. We were literature people, and the sound of what we were reading mattered. I participated in a feminist theory study group and another that read Deleuze, got seriously interested in Leo Bersani and as a young academic heard Hélène Cixous’ wonderful Amnesty lecture on freedom. Cixous’s take on psychoanalysis has been an inspiration to me. I was a founding member of JD, a fluid but persistent arrangement of academics from various countries who met annually to study a particular Derrida text. At the moment I am in a group reading Fred Moten. I retired from academia in 2018.