I have spent my career tracing the charged spaces where identity, culture, and the psyche's mythopoetic dimensions converge. As an academic and clinical anthropologist based in Scotland, I bring an ethnographer's curiosity to psychotherapy and mental health.

With a doctorate in anthropology from St. Andrews, I became a practising psychotherapist and clinical supervisor, lecturing for years across disciplines like mental health, psychotherapy, and complementary medicine. My path has led me to roles like national project manager for minority ethnic communities in the Scottish NHS and external examiner for training institutes.  But regardless of institutional processes, my work circles a central preoccupation: how do we attend to the elliptic spaces between selfhood and socio-cultural contexts? Between personal interiority and inscribed roles? I train my ethnographic lens on those missing narratives, sublimated mythologies, and unspoken power dynamics that pattern our mental experiences and therapeutic relationships. I argue for an anthropological fluency in psychoanalysis - a capacity to midwife the birthing of selves even as we exhume the dense symbolic systems and unconscious scripts that condition identity. From child-rearing to sexual desire to the re-enactments of political violence, I want us to inhabit the intersubjective terrains where we begin and end. In my writings and teachings, I guide others into those charged hyphenated spaces, those ellipses of identity negotiation where the work of mental well-being happens. It's uncertain territory, turbulent with the spectral forces of culture. But it's where we encounter most viscerally the making and unmaking of our stories and worlds.  An advocate for ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, I walk the ellipsis as both practitioner and researcher. My psychogeography traces the unmapped boundaries between therapist and client, analyst and analysand, self and other. It's liminal terrain, but I'm determined we must travel to engage the relational analytic of the psyche, society truly, and all that is bodied forth from the heat of their inter-implications. I have traversed many roles - lecturer, project manager, and examiner. But at my core, I am a cartographer of ellipses, mapping the gaps and fractures where our disparate worlds and subjectivities meet, merge, and emerge again metamorphosed. It is endlessly uncertain work, but it is where I believe the most vital psychological, cultural, and anthropological work lies.

Membership
 MEMBERSHIP OF PROFESSIONAL BODIES 

April 2023- Present American Psychological Association (APA)
April 2023 - Present American Association of Anthropology (AAA)

April 2011 - Present United Kingdom Counselling and Psychotherapy (UKCP) Oct 2008 - Present Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland (COSCA)

Aug 2008- Present           Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) 

May 2008- Present           Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) 

Sept 2008 - Present          International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA)

June 2008- Present          European Association of Transactional Analysis (EATA)  
Oct 2007- Present             Institute of Transactional Analysis (ITA) 
Sept 2005 – Present          European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

April 2005- Present            Fellow-The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) 

Jan  2005- Present             Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,                                                                            Manufacture and   Commerce (FRSA)