The consulting room is a space unlike any other. It exists, in a sense, outside ordinary time, a place where the familiar pressures of the day are held at some distance, and something else becomes possible.
People come for many reasons. Some arrive in crisis, feeling that the ground has shifted beneath them. Other people have a persistent feeling that something is not quite right, and want to change that.
Whatever brings you, the work begins with listening: not the partial listening of ordinary conversation, but something more sustained, exploratory and patient.
Psychotherapy is not a quick fix. The difficulties that bring people to therapy have usually been forming for quite a while, and don’t resolve themselves overnight. But engaging with them seriously can produce change that is real and lasting.
If any of this resonates, you are warmly invited to make contact.
– SARAH WOOD, June 2026
Sessions are available in person in Oxford, online via secure video, or by phone.
I usually suggest a preliminary consultation before we commit to working together.
I am a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, the College of Psychoanalysts and an accredited member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, which provides an ethical framework I am obliged to abide by. My clinical work is professionally supervised.
– SARAH WOOD, June 2026
I used to be an academic, starting in Oxford in the 1980s where I read English Literature and then took a DPhil on Robert Browning under the supervision of Ann Wordsworth and Daniel Karlin. As a student I started reading Derrida, including his important essays on psychoanalysis, and Freud. The DPhil eventually became my first book, Robert Browning: a Literary Life and the interest in Derrida and psychoanalysis continued to inform my curiosity about and enjoyment of the fundamental academic activities of reading, writing and teaching. I taught at Oxford, Goldsmiths, Queen Mary and elsewhere, published various essays as well as Derrida’s Writing and Difference (2009) and Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (2014) and served on the editorial boards of Angelaki: a Journal of the Theoretical Humanities and Oxford Literary Review, eventually ending my career as a Reader in English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Kent. Since then, I have continued to give papers and publish essays, most recently as a keynote at JD25 Hospitality at the University of Cork (2025) and in a special issue of the journal Política común called Deconstruction contra Fascist Mythologies (2024). I continue to love to read, of course, for example recently quite a lot of Fred Moten and Hélène Cixous.
I offer individual psychotherapy.
Sessions take place at least once a week and last 50 minutes. The number of sessions per week varies between individuals and at different stages of treatment.
Fees are set at a level that reflects the experience and qualifications brought to the work.
– SARAH WOOD, June 2026
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a collaborative, necessarily inventive form of conversation. It welcomes unexpected feelings, thoughts and memories. It offers a chance to explore thoughts and feelings that may be hard to express elsewhere.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapists accept and encourage therapeutic engagement with
…an unconscious mental life which is alive, active, and often full of conflicts, and which constantly influences our thinking and behaviour. — Nina Coltart
Psychoanalytic work explores the effects of this unconscious life as it interacts with the life you know. It takes on difficult thoughts and feelings in order to help you become more aware of the causes of your unhappiness, and invent your own unique way of living.
– SARAH WOOD, June 2026
Inquiries are welcome by email.
The practice is located in central north Oxford.
When you make contact, it is helpful to say something brief about what brings you.
There is no obligation of any kind in making an initial inquiry.
– SARAH WOOD, June 2026
