Shaifila Ladhani is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor from Delhi, India. Her work weaves together psychoanalysis, political life, and the aesthetics of survival. Her research centers on psychic deadness; not as a mere withdrawal or defensive structure, but as a rupture in the continuity of being. Drawing on clinical, theoretical, and poetic registers, she explores how individuals and communities survive states of inner collapse, and how traces of aliveness emerge within relational and collective life.

She holds a BA in Psychology with a minor in Sociology from Jamia Millia Islamia, and an MA in Psychosocial and Clinical Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi, where her work focused on the complexities of romantic love, sibling bonds, and forms of intimacy that exceed normative psycho-social templates.

Shaifila has worked in community mental health settings and maintained a private psychotherapy practice, engaging with clients across gendered, caste-marked, and class-fractured terrains. Her clinical work, informed by psychoanalytic psychotherapy and group analysis, remains attentive to the unspoken, the disavowed, and the ungrievable.

Her doctoral research explores psychic deadness as a psycho-political and affective condition, working through clinical case material, postcolonial theory, and contemporary psychoanalytic thought and is committed to holding the tension between psychic pain and the desire for transformation.

Outside academia is shaped by a deep commitment to care, political imagination, and the messy, beautiful labor of staying close to the world, even when it hurts. She finds meaning (and often loses it again) in poetry, absurdist cinema, and the quiet company of friends who let conversations stretch without conclusion. Romance, for her, is not just a feeling but a method: of thinking, of living, of staying soft in a hardening world. She has been part of organising efforts that emerge in moments of rupture, and believes in the quiet forms of resistance that begin in listening, showing up, and refusing to look away.