An Interview with Pauline Hodson

Pauline Hodson is a member of the British Society of Couple Psychotherapists and Counsellors (BSCPC) and The British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC). She has worked as a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Oxford for over twenty-five years. After first training as a natural childbirth teacher, and then as a couple counsellor with Relate, Pauline undertook the couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Institute for Marital Studies (now The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships), where she worked as visiting lecturer and clinical discussion group leader. Pauline was a founding member of and went on to co-chair the then Society for Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists (now the BSCPC) and initiated the Society's journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives in Couple Work (the predecessor to Couple and Family Psychoanalysis).

Pauline's first publication was The Invisible Matrix: An Exploration of Professional Relationships in the Service of Psychotherapy (2000); a collection of couple, individual, and group psychoanalytic papers, co-edited with Sasha Brookes. Prior to that she wrote a series of articles about the psychological and emotional aspects of working from home which led her to be commissioned to write her most recent book, The Business of Therapy: How To Run A Successful Private Practice (2012).

In her foreword to Pauline's latest book, which has occasioned this interview, Susie Orbach characterises it as, “written with much love and affection … a gift to our field”. Pauline's warmth and generosity are evident, not only in the sharing of her years of experience in private practice within the pages of her book, but also in her response to the invitation to share in this interview with Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, something of the ways in which her personal life has shaped the couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist she is today.