Draft:Stephen Frosh

Stephen Frosh (born...) is a...

A recent bio:

Stephen Frosh is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, where he founded the Department of Psychosocial Studies. He has a background in academic and clinical psychology and was Consultant Clinical Psychologist and latterly Vice Dean at the Tavistock Clinic, London, throughout the 1990s.

He is the author of many books and papers, including Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). His recent book Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis, was released last year by Bloomsbury. His book, Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness (Palgrave, 2019) won the 2023 British Psychological Society award for the best Academic Monograph. His current research interests are in processes of acknowledgement and recognition after social violence and in questions of social identity. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies.

Stephen is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a Founding Member of the Association of Psychosocial Studies, and an Honorary Member of the Institute of Group Analysis. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Early life and education

Frosh was born in 1954 to Sidney and Ruth Frosh (nee Glicksman). His father served as president of the United Synagogue in the 1980s and was previously active in Jewish education, particularly known for reforming the childcare charity Norwood.

Frosh attended the University of Sussex for his first degree and met his wife Judith there. Together they have three children.

Clinical work and psychoanalysis

From Joanna Bourke's history of Birkbeck:

"Stephen Frosh was appointed to the Department of Psychology in 1979, but he initially worked only part-time in the College, dividing his time with clinical jobs in the National Health Service and (for a decade) at the Tavistock Clinic as Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the family department. He only stopped his clinical work in 1998 when he was appointed professor."

Psychosocial studies

The Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College

Again from Joanna Bourke's history of Birkbeck:

"From 2000, however, a majority of researchers within the Department of Psychology began moving towards the neurosciences, marginalizing psychosocial approaches to human psychology. In response, those conducting more psychoanalytical and critical research decided to form a separate centre within the Department of Psychology. They considered calling themselves an Institute for Social Research or a Centre for Critical Theory, but in the end decided on Centre for Psychosocial Studies (CPS) because, as Frosh explains, ‘we were Psychologists and it was a way of doing it and it wasn’t really a term that anyone was using then’... Tensions peaked in the lead-up to the RAE in 2008. The College was under financial pressure due to reductions in funding from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Research in the Department of Psychology was increasingly orientating towards the neurosciences, which required expensive laboratories and imaging technologies... As head of the department, Mike Oaksford argued that the academic assessors on the 2008 panel for the Psychology Unit of Assessment would be unsympathetic to the research endeavours of psychosocial scholars, although this was disputed. He maintained that including psychosocial scholars in Birkbeck’s psychology assessment would lower their overall grade. He urged the CPS to be included in a different Unit of Assessment—that of Sociology.97 With great reluctance, and with only one year to go before the census date, Frosh was tasked with inventing a Sociology submission from within the College..."

As Frosh later recalled:

"it turned out that apart from my group in Psychology, there were another 20 or so people across the College [many in the Faculty of Continuing Education] who had nowhere to go. So almost anyone who could spell Sociology was in the Sociology Unit of Assessment in 2008! And it was alright, we didn’t do well but we did do respectably given that it was a ragbag of people, most of whom didn’t even know each other."

"This crisis cemented their fate: the Centre for Psychosocial Studies no longer felt welcome in the Department of Psychology... Becoming a separate department was therefore deemed to be ‘the most exciting option’.101 Realistically, it was their only option."

"To help the process of forging an intellectual community, Frosh founded and co-directed with interdisciplinary scholar Sasha Roseneil the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) as an umbrella centre for people working in the field. He and five of his colleagues from the Department of Psychology set up the Department of Psychosocial Studies. Their former disciplinary home was renamed the Department of Psychological Sciences, eventually becoming part of the School of Science, while the Department of Psychosocial Studies was incorporated into the School of Social Sciences, Philosophy, and History. It flourished, becoming one of the most influential departments of its type in the world. But the birthing process had been painful."