BPC Awards 2025

Dr Susan Mizen received the Innovative Excellence award. This award celebrates a striking example of ground-breaking work. The innovative nature of the work can be in clinical practice, research, or community embedded. Susan was awarded this year due to her work as the chair of the Medical Psychotherapy Faculty Executive at the Royal College of Psychiatrists which called together a group of organisations, the Talking Therapies Task Force (including the BPC), to make the case for investment in psychotherapeutic pathways for hospitalised patients with personality disorder. The report was launched in the Houses of Parliament in April 2025 and makes a clear clinical and economic case for a national programme of intensive therapeutic services to help shift care from hospitals to the community.

Tim Kent received the Outstanding Professional Leadership award. This award recognises individuals in a position of leadership who have developed their role to make a significant and outstanding contribution to developing their position and the psychoanalytic profession. After spending many years leading the primary care services at the Tavistock, Tim took up a senior leadership role here during a time of great difficulty for the organisation. Tim has been able to navigate a position between senior management (new and often not psychoanalytic) who are full of anxieties and frontline staff who are desperately attempting to hold the culture of their services and the traditions of the Tavistock. He has done this in a truly relational way – emphasising the need for compassionate thoughtfulness and understanding of the unconscious life of an organisation in all of his interactions.

The Association for Psychodynamic Practice and Counselling (APPCIOS) received the Diversity in Training Award. This award focuses on training and supervision that gives special attention to thinking about diversity. This may include, for example, curriculum developments, projects to address inclusivity or programmes that address barriers to access.This year’s winner received a number of nominations that spoke to the inclusivity of the organisation and its training. One nominator noted “As an observant Haredi Jew, finding a pathway into the psychoanalytic community has not been straightforward. Traditional routes into training can feel inaccessible — culturally, geographically, and financially. What I found in APPCIOS was not only an open door, but also genuine support and encouragement to take my place within the wider psychoanalytic world.” 

Professor Robert Hinshelwood received the first Lifetime Achievement award of the evening. This award recognises those who have made significant, sustained contributions to the psychoanalytic profession over their career. Professor Hinshelwood is recognised for teaching and inspiring so many practitioners over his long career. Further to his role as an NHS clinician and psychoanalyst his particular contribution has been to psychoanalytic scholarship, writing and teaching. He has advocated hard for research innovation and rigor as it relates to the testing of psychoanalytic theory of relevance to psychoanalytic practice, and his tally of psychoanalytic publications, notably textbooks, is extremely impressive.

Professor Joy Schaverien posthumously received the second Lifetime Achievement award of the evening. Professor Joy Schaverien passed away in May 2025 and was considered a hugely influential figure. She integrated her background of art therapy with Jungian analysis, Joy published many books and articles, covering groundbreaking subjects such as art and the image and therapeutic processes, the dying patient, the erotic in the consulting room, and, most famously, Boarding School Syndrome. Her work in this area was transformative in terms of giving voice to the experiences of those who have suffered both personally and across the generations and in families. 

Professor Alessandra Lemma received the Bernard Ratigan award for Psychoanalysis and Diversity. This award applauds an individual or organisation that has significantly improved or developed inclusivity in matters of diversity such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, disability etc. in psychoanalytic practice. Professor Lemma was selected for her courageous and consistent focus on clinical work with populations who are often misunderstood by psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of gender diversity. She has shared insights of this work with other professionals in an accessible and stimulating way, for example speaking at the BPC event working with gender questioning young people in 2023. 

Professor Lisa Baraitser received our new award in Dedication to Psychoanalytic Scholarship. This award celebrates contributions to the advancement of psychoanalytical scholarship. Recipients of the this award will have contributed  and developed their ideas in the psychoanalytic field through academic or popular publications, teaching, organisational contributions, media work, or research projects. Professor Baraitser is highly regarded internationally as an expert in psychosocial studies and has published widely, as well as giving many keynote talks around the world, including the BPC’s PPNow conference in 2022. She has held prestigious grants for her psychoanalytic research, including from the Wellcome Trust for the ‘Waiting Times’ project, which explored the experience of waiting within the context of practices of care in healthcare. 

Please join us in celebrating all of our brilliant and deserving awardees as well as our 30 years of work, development and collaboration within the psychoanalytic profession.

We’d also love to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted a nomination for the BPC Awards this year. We received a record number of nominations and really enjoyed pouring over all of the lovely testimonies and descriptions of incredible work in our field. This rich engagement is so appreciated and whilst not everyone could be shortlisted for an award, we will continue in our efforts to promote psychoanalytic work year round.