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Dr Alistair Ross

Dean of Degrees, Emerita/Emeritus Fellow, Fellow

Associate Professor in Psychotherapy

Oxford Lifelong Learning

PhD (Birmingham); MA (Oxford); MPhil (Wales); BA (Liverpool), BA (CNAA/Spurgeon’s College); MBACP (Snr Accred.); FHEA

Alistair Ross was Director of Psychodynamic Studies, and Associate Professor in Psychotherapy at the Department for Continuing Education, and an associate member in the Faculty of Theology and Religion
Alistair first trained as a Baptist minister then later as a psychodynamic counsellor at Leicester University, and as a psychodynamic supervisor at Birmingham University. He led the MA in Psychodynamic Counselling at the University of Birmingham. He is a senior accredited counsellor and supervisor with the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and was Chair of BACP’s Professional Ethics and Quality Standards Committee (2010-2015). He was also Chair of the Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association (2019-2024).
He is currently a therapist in private practice and an Episcopal Pastoral Supervisor (Church Commissioners).

Alistair’s research focusses on the relationships between the sacred, spirituality, religion, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. His latest books are Sigmund Freud: pocket GIANTS (The History Press, 2016); Introducing Contemporary Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy. The Art and Science of the Unconscious (Open University Press, 2019); ‘Psychodynamic Approaches’ in A. Reeves, An Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy. From Theory to Practice, 3rd ed. (Sage, 2022) and Sigmund Freud: A Reference Guide to His Life and Work (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, now Bloomsbury, 2022).

Lectures/articles/chapters include: ‘Michael Eigen – Psychoanalytic Mystic’, ‘Letters from Vienna: Freud and his friend Pastor Pfister’; ‘Sacred Psychoanalysis’ – the emergence of spirituality in contemporary psychoanalysis; ‘Spiritual factors in therapy’; ‘Harry Guntrip: an early relational psychoanalyst’; and ‘Winnicott’s analysis of Guntrip revisited’.