Ritika Singh
PhD Candidate in Psychoanalysis
GCAS College Dublin
Based in New Delhi, India
Biography
Ritika Singh is an existential-psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a doctoral researcher 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 is grounded in clinical practice and shaped by feminist and psychoanalytic thought. Through her work, she asks what survival looks like when affection is conditional, when loyalty replaces autonomy, and when a daughter is required to become someone before she has figured out who she is.
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 training is ongoing and closely connected to her day-to-day clinical work.
Her practice focuses on patients who often function well in the world but experience a persistent internal blockage or lack of access to feeling. She is interested in psychic inhibition, ambivalence, emotional over-functioning, and what gets sacrificed in the process of keeping everything together. Her clinical method is depth-oriented and structured around the belief that speech alone is not always therapeutic, especially when it is used to defend against what has never been metabolised.
While a significant portion of her research is focused on the psychic lives of women and daughters in India, her clinical work is broader. She works with men struggling with guilt and muted aggression, with only children navigating hyper-responsibility and perfectionism, and with adults who feel alienated from their own desire. Her approach is not issue-based or symptom-driven. It is shaped by attention to structure, repetition, and unconscious compromise.
Her thinking draws from Freud, Melanie Klein, Simone de Beauvoir, Lauren Berlant, Frantz Fanon, Sudhir Kakar, and from ongoing clinical encounters with patients whose lives do not fit into simple narratives.
Research Interests
Maternal failure and psychic survival
Inhibition, compliance, and blocked ambition
Only child dynamics and emotional centrality
Clinical work with adult men
Caste and class in the psychic development of women
Speech, shame, and therapeutic ethics
Academic and Clinical Affiliations
PhD Researcher at GCAS College Dublin
Trainee in Observational Studies, Indian Psychoanalytical Society, Mumbai
Diplomate in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, Viktor Frankl Institute, Israel
Master’s in Clinical Psychology, Amity University
Bachelor’s in Applied Psychology, Gargi College, University of Delhi
Supervisor
Professor Lewis Gordon
Outside GCAS
She lives in Delhi. She is serious about food, particular about wine, and interested in how aesthetic taste reflects deeper psychic structure. She tends to keep more tabs open than necessary and often reads in half-finished bursts. She prefers depth over speed, structure over spectacle, and thinking that leads somewhere unfamiliar.