Dr Marita Vyrgioti

Biography

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and hold a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, fully-funded by a competitive Anniversary SHSS scholarship. Before joining Essex, I worked as a Research Assistant on a Dangoor Foundation-funded project on Jewish eating and ethics, as well as a longtitudinal psychosocial study of girls and class in the UK (Cardiff University). I also worked as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College and the University of East London. My background includes a psychoanalytic clinical training at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, as well as more than six years of experience delivering psychoanalytic psychotherapy within the NHS and other psychotherapy services across London. My work brings together clinical experiences and academic research, and my core expertise includes (1) the study of coloniality, racism, and racialisation in psychoanalysis, (2) imaginaries of the metabolic function and psychosocial theories of feeding and eating (3) the study of the skin as a psychosocial site of inscription. My long-standing interest in the economies of race in psychoanalysis centres on the historical and epistemological entanglements between psychoanalysis and colonialism. In my article “Psychoanalysis in Times of Anti-Blackness” (2023), I examine how the psychoanalyst and anthropologist Géza Róheim engaged with the socio-political conditions of colonial power and how these conditions informed his conceptualisation of the human mind. The article interrogates the colonial foundations underpinning Róheim’s theorising and fieldwork, while highlighting the racialised dynamics that continue to shape psychoanalysis today. I am also interested in the function of the analyst in the clinic, and particularly through conceptualisations of the psychoanalytic process as a metabolic activity. I develop these ideas in a forthcoming paper provisionally titled “The Analyst as Stomach.” My interest in racialisation and the skin has more recently led me toward examining the skin as both a psychic container and a site of social inscription. This has prompted questions about the psychosocial meanings of contemporary anti-ageing tweakments (such as Botox and fillers). I explore these themes in another forthcoming article, “Psychosocial Skins: Botox and the Desire for Impermeable Boundaries” to appear in a Special Issue on “Tweakments Culture” in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society in 2026, co-edited with Dr Emilia Halton-Hernandez. Alongside Prof Stephen Frosh and Dr Julie Walsh, I am co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies (2024), the first comprehensive handbook in the field.

Qualifications

• PhD in Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck College, University of London,

• MA in Foundations of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust/University of Essex,

Appointments

Other academic

• Programme Director, Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex (4/9/2023 - present)

• Ethics Officer, Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex (1/9/2021 - 19/12/2024)