The work
Within the transference specific to psychoanalysis, the work consists in sustaining a position that enables each person to encounter what, for them, constitutes a question: their desire, their singular way of being in the world, their repetitions, the successive impasses, the mark of the signifiers that affect them, and, as it is so often formulated, that sense that “things are not going well”, “nothing works”, or “I keep going round in circles”.
Creating the conditions for a different relation to the symptoms that persist. Discovering. So that a saying of one’s own can emerge.
I work with adults, in both French and English. Speaking in one language rather than the other, or moving between them, is never neutral; it is part of what is listened to.
The path
Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Auckland, Vancouver, London: the geography is one form of displacement. French and English, another. Clinical psychology, rehabilitation centres and private practice, a third.
Trained in Anglo-Saxon psychological approaches and having worked in settings where acute distress calls for urgent intervention (addiction, exclusion), I have been engaged in parallel, for decades, in the Freudo-Lacanian tradition in French, and now orient my work within a psychoanalytic framework.
Training and affiliation
- Master of Arts, Integrative Counselling (Distinction)
- Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom
- MBACP Registered Member
- British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
- Clinical supervision
- With Rudy Goubet Bodard
- Regular seminars
- With Christian Dubuis Santini: Lacan, nous & le réel (and, in English, Lacan, us & the Real)
- Private practice since 2020
- Auckland, then London
- Clinical trainings
- Children under legal care in the child-protection system (Nancy, France) · Alcoholism (Vancouver, British Columbia) · Alcoholism and addiction (Auckland, New Zealand)
Publications and interviews
Since 2021 I have written regularly for Le Petit Journal, the newspaper of the French community abroad, first in Auckland, now in London, on expatriation, language, addiction, fear, denial and the question of belonging. The full list is on the Writings page.
- À Londres, que faisons-nous de ce « nous » ?
- L’Édito de Frédérique Stref, psychologue française à Auckland
- « When I arrived in New Zealand it was like I received a big wave of life force »
- Frédérique Stref : « La Nouvelle-Zélande m’a reconnectée avec la nature »
- Psychologie : osez-vous encore penser sans compter ?