Overview

Margherita is a BPC registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist in full time private practice and before then worked as an adult psychotherapist in an NHS psychoanalytic psychotherapy Service in the North of England.

Margherita’s background is in social anthropology, and she hold a PhD from the University of St Andrews. As an anthropologist, Margherita carried out long term ethnographic fieldwork in Panama with Guna indigenous people living in the San Blas Archipelago. Her research and publications have been in the areas of kinship studies, looking at how notions about Guna relatedness inform the forging and caring for new relationship between mother, babies, and other kinspersons according to local notions of living well with each other in densely populated islands of San Blas.

As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Margherita has a keen interest and focus on clinical work and a particular interest in Klein and in post-Kleinian developments. Margherita is interested in how these clinical ideas help our understanding of, and working with, those suffering at the border of psychotic processes, using splitting, projections, identifications, and idealisations as omnipotent defences against anxieties. Margherita is interested in how these anxieties can be mitigated in the analytic work, with allowing more capacity for a deeper sense of oneself and deeper relationships to others.

At Exeter, Margherita enjoys helping trainees developing their capacity to be receptive to their patients and be able to move from the experiential to the theoretical, enabling the deepening of their identity as therapists with a strong focus on clinical work.