I’m Sabah Siddiqui, a writer, researcher, and psychotherapist. I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester, where I studied faith healing practices and the ways in which science and tradition converge in mental health care. I’ve long been drawn to the contours of what counts as knowledge, including the place of fiction in social research. Ghost stories, in particular, have stayed with me, offering ways to think about what haunts us, individually and collectively. My monograph, Religion and Psychoanalysis in India, was published by Routledge in 2016, and my doctoral thesis carried forward this work under the title Faith Healing at a Muslim Shrine in Gujarat, India: Exploring the Site, Subject, and Ghost.

Over the years, my research and writing have focused on questions of gender, power, and violence, as well as culture, community, and care. In 2024, I completed two projects especially close to me: co-editing a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society on “Psychoanalytic Perspectives from South Asia,” and an edited volume for Routledge titled A People’s History of the Farmers’ Movement, 2020–2021. My editorial work, including Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam (Routledge, 2019) and a special issue on “Sex and Power in the University” for the Annual Review of Critical Psychology, has allowed me to think collaboratively and across disciplines, with others who are reimagining the terms of critical thought and political life.

Alongside my academic work, I practise as a psychodynamic psychotherapist and clinical psychologist. The clinic, for me, is a place where listening becomes an ethical act, and where suffering, desire, ambivalence, and the unconscious are held with seriousness. My approach draws from multiple strands of psychoanalytic theory — including Object Relations, Group Analysis, Freud, and Lacan — and is shaped by a commitment to the ethics of restraint, repair, and radical openness. I am interested in how we sustain spaces of encounter that do not rush to resolve, but instead allow new forms of relationality, responsibility, and meaning to slowly take shape.

From 2022 to 2024, I had the chance to lead the psychology department at Krea University, a role that called for holding space for difference, and engaging in the quiet, sustained labour of making things possible. I am currently based at Krea, where I continue to teach, write, and collaborate. I hold a deep interest in critical pedagogy, particularly in creating classroom spaces that are dialogic, rigorous, and hospitable to uncertainty. I remain guided by the belief that knowledge is made in relation…