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Jan Abram

Jan Abram PhD is a psychoanalyst, Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London and Honorary Research Fellow at the Anna Freud Centre. She is a Fellow of the British Psycho-Analytical Society where her current administrative positions include: Deputy Chair of the Foundation Course in Psychoanalysis, Honorary Secretary of the Scientific Committee, and an Ordinary Member of the Archives Committee. She also sits on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Jan Abram is a Training Therapist and Supervisor for the Lincoln Institute of Psychotherapy and the London Centre of Psychotherapy where she also teaches the work of Freud. At the Institute of Psychoanalysis she teaches the work of Winnicott and chairs group discussions for the Foundation Course in psychoanalysis. She is also a Consultant Psychoanalyst for the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis.

Between 1989 and 2000 Jan Abram worked for the Squiggle Foundation (an organisation dedicated to the dissemination of D.W.Winnicott’s work), as a teacher/lecturer and she served a four year term as director (1996 – 2000). During this time she published her first book – Psychotherapy Trainings: a guide in 1992. Emerging out of the many courses and workshops she convened on the work of D.W.Winnicott, in the UK and abroad, she published her second book The Language of Winnicott: a dictionary of Winnicott’s use of words (1996). This book was awarded Outstanding Academic Book of the Year in 1997, by Choice Magazine (a North American academic journal that reviews new scholarly books). The second edition of The Language of Winnicott was published in 2007.

Jan Abram is General Editor for the Collected Works of D.W.Winnicott, a project she has been developing since 1998, with the aim of producing all the published and unpublished writings of Winnicott in chronological order. This project was sponsored by the Winnicott Trust where she has worked as the Honorary Archivist since 2002. Alongside her research for the Collected Works of D.W.Winnicott project she is currently editing a collection of papers on Winnicott for the New Library of Psychoanalysis – Donald Winnicott Today.

Her clinical research activities include membership of the Core Group of Moderators for the Working Party on the Specificity of Psychoanalysis Today under the aegis of the European Psychoanalytic Federation. The aim of this working party is to develop and refine a methodology aimed at the examination of the psychoanalytic clinical encounter and the specifics of psychoanalysis as a treatment.  

Her present clinical interests focus on the meaning of psychic survival associated with critiques and versions of the death instinct stemming from Freud’s later work, and its comparison with Winnicott’s theories of aggression and primary psychic creativity.

She works in London, in private practice, and can be contacted via the Psychoanalysis Unit.