Ritika Singh

PhD Candidate in Psychoanalysis 

GCAS College Dublin

Based in New Delhi, India

A woman with dark hair smiling while holding a large, fluffy orange cat in an indoor setting with wooden doors and white walls.

Biography

Ritika Singh is an existential-psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a doctoral candidate at GCAS College Dublin. Her PhD project, titled The Illegible Daughter: On Psychic Survival and Maternal Refusal in Contemporary India, examines the long-term psychological impact of inconsistent maternal care and the strategies individuals develop to endure emotional absence. Her work emerges from clinical practice and is shaped by feminist and existential-psychoanalytic traditions; it turns on the question of survival in circumstances where affection becomes contingent upon conformity, where loyalty is demanded at the expense of autonomy, such that the daughter is compelled to fashion a self prematurely, before the conditions for self-discovery have properly materialized.

She studied Applied Psychology at Gargi College, University of Delhi, and earned a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from Amity University. She trained in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis through the Viktor Frankl Institute in Israel, where she focused on meaning-oriented/existential  psychotherapy. She is currently part of the Observational Studies Programme at the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in Mumbai, where she studies infant observation, early psychic development, and the clinical legacies of Freud and Klein. Her practice attends to patients who, despite maintaining a competent outward presence, struggle with a more intractable inhibition of affect or an enduring sense of inner obstruction. Her core preoccupation is with the psychic economy through which inhibition and ambivalence sustain themselves, the forms of emotional over-functioning that emerge as compensations, the inherent need for symptoms to be topograph-ised with nurturance, and the subtle but significant sacrifices required to preserve an appearance of coherence. The clinical orientation she adopts is depth-focused, organised around the conviction that speech cannot be assumed to heal in itself, particularly when it operates defensively against what has remained unprocessed in the psyche.

Although much of her research concentrates on the psychic lives of women and daughters in India, the scope of her clinical practice extends beyond this focus. She attends to men whose conflicts manifest through guilt or through aggression that has been rendered subterranean, to only children whose developmental trajectories are marked by the burdens of hyper-responsibility and perfectionism, and to adults whose estrangement from desire produces a sense of dislocation from themselves. Her orientation does not reduce itself to a catalogue of issues or symptoms; rather, it is organised around questions of psychic structure, the force of repetition, the meaningful manifestation of symptoms, and the compromises forged in the unconscious. The theoretical scaffolding of her work draws on Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Yalom, Frankl, Beauvoir, Berlant, Fanon, Kakar, and on the interpretive challenges posed by clinical encounters with patients whose lives resist assimilation into coherent or linear narratives.

Research Interests 

Maternal failure and psychic survival

Inhibition and compliance 

Only child dynamics and emotional centrality

Clinical work with adult men

Caste and class in the psychic development of women

Desire, speech, shame, and therapeutic ethics

Academic and Clinical Affiliations

  1. PhD Researcher at GCAS College Dublin

  2. Trainee in Observational Studies, Indian Psychoanalytical Society, Mumbai

  3. Diplomate in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, Viktor Frankl Institute, Israel

  4. Master’s in Clinical Psychology, Amity University

  5. Bachelor’s in Applied Psychology, Gargi College, University of Delhi

Supervisor

Professor Lewis Gordon

Outside GCAS

Outside her work at GCAS, she resides in Delhi, where seriousness about food and precision in matters of wine are less questions of lifestyle than extensions of a conviction that taste discloses something fundamental about psychic organisation. Her habits of reading and browsing - tabs multiplied, texts engaged in fragments - suggest a restless orientation that nonetheless insists on depth rather than speed, and on lines of thought that lead into the unfamiliar rather than returning to the already known.

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