My Psychoanalytic Story: with Valerie Sinason

Niamh: Tell us your name, where you’re based and a bit about your professional background.

Valerie: My name is Valerie Leevers. For my work, I use my first married professional name of Sinason. Now entering retirement, I use my married name of the last 23 years which is Leevers. During COVID we moved from living in Northwest London to Brighton. We live near the seafront and our family are quite happy to visit us here as we’re not too far.

I started with an English literature degree which I consider to be utterly crucial for anything therapeutic. I was very lucky in that when I applied for the child therapy training, at the Tavistock,  Mattie Harris, who founded it with John Bowlby, was an English literature graduate and fought the Department of Health every year to allow entry for English literature graduates, as long as it was accompanied by a postgraduate year that included work with children. So, I had an English literature degree and a postgraduate teaching diploma for English and Drama.

Once I had children and when they were five and seven, I started to think about what I’d like to go back to. I thought about teaching but by luck we moved next door to a Tavistock child therapist named Sue Reid, one of the wonderful teachers on the child training. She knew I loved working with children and asked if I’d ever thought of child therapy, which I hadn’t. I became a child therapist, and thanks to my teaching diploma, I could be paid to work in schools that didn’t have any extra money for therapy, but that could pay me out of teaching funds. It was clear that child therapy would be the way forward for me and working with traumatised and disabled children.

My maternal grandmother had a mild learning disability and lived with us. It was a secret. I was brought up being told:

“Both of your grandmothers are illiterate because that’s how they treated women then. Aren’t you lucky being born in this age?”

It took years to realise the secret, that with nan it was more than that. She had a mild disability through trauma. Her parents were refugees from pogroms. So, despite the happiness and inspired manner and contribution of my parents, my father was a Professor Stanley Segal and was awarded an OBE for his disability work, unconsciously, these traumas worked their way through in me so that disability and trauma came my way.

By synchronicity, a remarkable psychoanalyst in the adult department of the Tavistock, Neville Symington, started a “mental handicap workshop”. From the moment I joined, it was home. I found that, I wasn’t just accepted in that workshop, but appreciated, as I could really offer something different through lived experience and it being my father’s field.

Judith Trowell asked me if I would work with an adult with severe multiple disability because ethically she felt a child therapist would do that better because of observing nonverbal behaviour, and she gave me ethical permission and supervision. I did that and then more adult disability referrals came my way, so I went on to do an adult psychoanalytic training. After I’d done that, I did a PhD on disability and trauma because it became clear that our workshop was becoming a voice for the excluded and we wanted it to be as rigorous and scientific as possible. So that has been a wonderful career, and a commitment more than a career. It’s life. It was a life that I was thoroughly enjoying through training and teaching at the Tavistock and St Georges Hospital.

What suddenly changed my life next was that a learning disability psychologist from Sweden named Anders Svensson asked for my help with a severely abused woman. It unfolded that she’d been ritually abused, which was something I’d heard of in America but never read anything about. I was dumb struck and didn’t speak for a year about it. I supervised Anders free for a year, spending an hour with him each week. He would send me her voice in Swedish, so I could hear her tone. It took a year before the patient began to communicate unbearable, cruel experiences. The moment we named it, all her self-injury stopped, all her psychotic symptoms went and because it was Sweden, she was given a safe place to live, because they provide that. They’re 50 years ahead in some areas of practise.

It took a year for me to break the power of the secret. Richard Davis, who was director of the Portman Clinic then, co-ran a seminar with me for social workers about abuse. He said:

“What’s wrong with you? Every week I come in, you look sick and you’ve been on a call to Sweden.”

I just burst into tears and told him about the case and he arranged for Anders to come to the Portman clinic and meet the team there. Scotland Yard sent a couple of detectives to help them and suddenly there was this disturbing new field I was in. Later, I mentioned at a Scottish conference:

“If you think ritual abuse only exists in America, I worked with the case in Sweden and it’s real.” Suddenly, I was inundated with referrals and I have rarely felt so shocked and devastated in my life. All the institutions around me were too nervous to take it on, especially when the government grants came to an end. So, I ended up taking the subject home and creating a clinic for dissociative studies. Then really sadly I left the Tavistock, which had been my lovely training home and my home as a senior psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. They could not manage the controversy. Unless it comes to you, you wouldn’t choose to hear it. I was finding that a third of the ritual abuse survivors had dissociative identity disorder. So, there was so much new learning about multiple personality conditioning through torture and working with victims.

After retiring from the clinic, I went onto work with different therapists in Ukraine by Zoom who suddenly had to deal with torture and rape victims at the same time as fearing it would actually happen to themselves. I couldn’t have done this without my previous years of work. That’s the strange way my trajectory has gone. My grandparents had come from Kiev and Odessa, it felt so strange that all this time after my brave grandparents moved to England, their unspoken memories came to roost in me in some way too. So, it feels like a very profound circle it’s all gone in.

Niamh: It sounds like you have a very deep experience in communicating with people that aren’t able to communicate in a traditional way. I’d love to know more about that. I wonder what sort of lessons you’ve learned about communication in such an unconventional setting?

Valerie: I’ve learned how dissociative a therapist I was earlier without knowing it. All the careful uniform of language that I’d internalised was completely smashed up. I remember with one patient, at the end of our session, I said:

“See you next week.” And the patient said,

“Excuse me, you don’t know if I’ll be alive in half an hour after I’ve left this room. What do you mean? See you next week? That’s part of your stupid, useless attitude.”

Absolutely correct. Of course certain groups can’t plan. Why would they? So, simple things like that. You never forget being taught like that.

The other lesson I learnt was how amazing humans are at being able to hibernate through terror to then come out again. I went to the island of Leros, where the learning disabled were kept in horrendous states. I was part of the EC group that went out to assess what was happening. The patients weren’t dressed. They were tied to their beds in case of a fit, they were just given nothing, no dignity, nothing. I approached some patients all entwined together and said the sentence in Greek that I’d learned which was:

“Hello, my name is Valerie, I’m from England.” And this man with Downs Syndrome emerged from the group and held out a hand. I felt so utterly ill and didn’t want to go near him but I held my hand out, shook hands with him, turned round, slowly walked out, went into the bathroom, struggled against vomiting and scrubbed my hands clean. A year later I went to Athens where the group had been moved and given a proper disability home. I ring the doorbell and there is the same man with Downs syndrome. He opens the door and gives me a big beam, then points for me to go up the stairs. So I do, where there’s a cupboard and he’s got two shirts and two pairs of trousers and he holds them up proudly to show me. With the help of an interpreter, he said:

“I remember you, you shook my hand in Leros.”

That’s one of those moments that will stay forever. It was such a moment of realisation, of recognising his humanity and intelligence. He dared to come up to say hello. There is no level of disability where there isn’t something being transmitted and something profoundly moving as well.

Niamh: I suppose that shows it’s just the act of communicating that is important. It seems that you’ve had to challenge and question your own learning quite a lot through your career. I’d love to know more about your relationship with self-confidence and trusting yourself.

Valerie: I think that I could trust that I wouldn’t reject anybody. I would no longer think I had any answers outside of the therapeutic relationship. Whilst an intellectual person can be grateful to lie on the couch while someone quietly reflected with them, when someone’s been traumatised, a neutral face that’s not facing them will traumatise them more. So, having bought myself a beautiful couch when I qualified as an analyst, it then has only been used for people to sit on facing me. It was learning that if you’ve been abused by family and others that can give you friendly glances one minute and then change, why would you trust someone sitting behind you? It was a slow change. I retained the confidence that I am here and I’m not going to run away from you and whatever you do, I’m still here. You can reject me, but I’m staying here and that was the bit I had confidence in. It was really recognising that just someone daring to come was such a major step.

Another mistake several patients reprimanded me for was saying,

“You’re safe here.” It took me a while to get rid of that because I so cared that that’s what I should be offering. Whereas for some of the patients, that was the most dangerous place they’d put themselves in. It makes me think of Patrick Casements’ book with the lovely title, ‘Learning from the patients’ and you certainly do with a severely traumatised group. Especially with the ways in which an apparently minor facial expression can trigger powerful feelings.

With these particular groups, the longer you don’t speak the bigger the fear. Like the neutral face in attachment theory, that having a face that’s not showing you authentic feelings is really traumatising. This is more understood now but wasn’t then. The situation was also exciting because that feels like going back to early Freud and Ferenczi. You are finding out step-by-step relationally and through attachment what works with someone and what doesn’t.

Niamh: Let’s bring things back to present day now that you’re winding things down. How do you feel about it slowing down your practise? And how do you feel about what the future looks like in your profession?

Valerie: At 60, I gave 10 years notice to my patients with the aim of also finding somebody to take over the Clinic for Dissociative Studies and I’m delighted Mark Linington, who used to be Chair of the Bowlby Centre, is CEO.  In the past 25 years it has got much larger. The subject is getting more therapists involved now, which is a huge relief.

I was also lucky I said 70 as my retirement age, because my husband got mixed dementia then. I have stopped ongoing clinical work except for a few consultations, supervisions and zoom talks. I’m currently doing some applied television work. I also have links with South African projects that matter to me like the Bushman Heritage Museum and organisations on disability and dissociation, The ISSTD and the IPD, Institute of Psychotherapy and Disability, which I am President of.

The main activity that I can spend time on is writing. I had my first novel published last year, The Orpheus Project, which has a learning disabled heroine at the centre who has experienced organised abuse and is sent to an NHS trauma unit. I wanted to see if I could portray that experience in a novel. I have just finished a second novel, too which will be out in March 2026: Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company. I also have several contracted books. I grew up in a writing family. So, the moment my computer is on, I’ve got all my ancestors urging me on. It goes right back to the English literature degree and having always written poetry.

In retirement, identity is hard, it is a confusing changing thing, a slow giving up. When so much of identity is around what you do. I still do miss the ‘live-ness’ of meeting another in that therapeutic privileged way. The privileged way we were given access to someone, how precious that was. So, I’m very grateful to reflect on that. I’ve never met such brave people, those with disability and dissociation, the way they bore their ‘otheredness’ and dared to communicate, to educate us. They were some of the bravest people you could ever meet.

So, I’m very grateful that the clinic for Dissociative Studies carries on, that Jo Stubley in the Tavistock Trauma Unit is carrying on. That more and more survivors are daring to speak up and write. Having been a therapist was a privilege and it leaves a treasure chest for further reflection. Thank you for giving me a voice.