Frédérique Stref · Psychoanalyst

Psychoanalysis in French and English, in South Kensington

A place to speak, in either language, about what repeats, what resists, and what one cannot quite put into words. In-person sessions for adults.

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Portrait of Frédérique Stref, psychoanalyst in South Kensington

A place to talk

Hearing what is at stake

“Something is not right.” “Nothing works.” “I keep going round in circles.” People arrive with a symptom, a weariness, a repetition that has become impossible to ignore, a succession of impasses.

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 mark of the signifiers that affect them.

Creating the conditions for a different relation to what persists. Discovering. So that a saying of one’s own can emerge.

Afternoon light through a tall sash window, casting the shadow of a branch onto a pale wall

A path

Shaped by displacement

Geographical: Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Auckland, Vancouver, London. Linguistic: French and English. Institutional: clinical psychology, rehabilitation centres, private practice. And, above all, subjective displacement.

Trained in Anglo-Saxon psychological approaches and having worked where acute distress calls for urgent intervention, I have been engaged in parallel, for decades, in the Freudo-Lacanian tradition, and now orient my work within a psychoanalytic framework.

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In practice