Louise Braddock is an Independent Scholar whose research spans the two disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis, working with members of the London Philosophy-Psychoanalysis Group and with psychoanalytic colleagues in London and Sydney.
Louise works 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.
She originally trained as a psychiatrist, then became a philosopher, gaining her PhD from the University of Reading in 2000. Between 2006 and 2017 she was a Bye-Fellow at Girton College at the University of Cambridge, where she taught philosophy. She lectured on the Philosophy of Mind and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis and also attended the long-standing Cambridge Psychoanalysis Reading Group.
Louise is an associate member of the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Oxford, where she formerly taught and lectured on the Philosophy of Social Science. Also in Oxford, since 2005 she has co-convened (with Paul Tod) the Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis in the St John’s College Research Centre.
She 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, Louise was the Director of Research for the ISRF.
