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Valerie Sinason Is A child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst who is well known for her pioneering work with learningdisabled patients. For the last decade she has also been at the forefront of the growing awareness and understanding of ritual abuse and the ways that psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be used to treat its victims. Sinason has played a key role in developing the current understanding of the psychodynamics of this abuse. This controversial work has also focussed on establishing the traumatic aetiology of dissociative identity disorder (DID) and has highlighted its link with ritual abuse. In 1998 she founded the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, which has seen more DID patients than any other single treatment centre in the United Kingdom. This interview took place on 16 April 2003, sitting in her garden in north London.
Graeme Galton: You're perhaps best known for your learning disability work, and it's now 24 years since you saw your first learning-disabled patient…
Valerie Sinason: Gosh.
GG: … and I was wondering what feelings you have about your pioneering work in that field?
VS: It feels very strange because that's the field that I thought would be my only field for the rest of my life. So I have a sense of
loss, despite the fact I'm still deeply involved in it, both with working one day a week at St George's Hospital and also working with learning-disabled clients who have been ritually abused or have dissociative disorders. I also have an incredible sense of pleasure that things which were seen as impossible or mad, that amount of time ago, are now really deeply accepted and established. The Government's White Paper on valuing people is now saying what we were saying 25 years ago, things that we were really seen as mad or pollyanna-ish for even considering, at best. So I have a sense of one part that is complete, in terms of the need to make something get properly into the mainstream social arena and not be marginalized.
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