Dr Lizaveta van Munsteren is a clinician and academic specialising in psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapy, psychosocial studies, and the cultural and historical dimensions of mental health. She joined King’s College London as a Lecturer in Psychotherapy in August 2025.

She studied medicine in Belarus and clinical psychology in Russia before completing an MA and PhD in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She subsequently trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and continues her clinical development through further psychoanalytic training. She is a Chartered Psychologist (BPS) and psychodynamic psychotherapist (BPC), working in the NHS and private practice.

Lizaveta has taught across undergraduate, postgraduate and professional clinical training programmes in the UK, including at Birkbeck, University of London, UCL, the British Psychotherapy Foundation and the John Bowlby Centre. At King’s, her teaching focuses on psychoanalytic theory and its clinical foundations, the history and development of psychotherapy, and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding mental life.

Her research examines psychoanalytic concepts in their theoretical, clinical, historical and interdisciplinary contexts. A central strand of her work concerns psychoanalytic metapsychology and the ways in which models of the mind develop through encounters with other disciplines, particularly neuropsychology, psychophysiology, psychiatry and general medicine. She is interested both in the conceptual development of psychoanalytic ideas and in how they are translated into clinical thinking and practice.

Her monograph, The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930–1980 (Routledge, 2025), examined the transformations and continued circulation of psychoanalytic ideas under Soviet political and institutional conditions. Alongside the social and political history of psychoanalysis, the book traced less recognised interdisciplinary exchanges between psychoanalytic theory and Soviet psychology and medicine, including neuropsychology, psychophysiology and pathopsychology — a distinctive Soviet tradition of psychological assessment and differential diagnosis. This work informs her broader interest in what happens to psychoanalytic concepts when they move between disciplinary, scientific and clinical traditions.

Her earlier research at the V.M. Bekhterev Psychoneurological Research Institute in St Petersburg combined clinical psychology with research in psychiatric settings, including research on self-image in patients with schizophrenia and depression. More recently, as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the FREEPSY project at the University of Essex, she conducted historical and archival research on psychoanalytic free clinics, examining the relationship between psychoanalytic practice and its social, political and institutional conditions.

Her current research develops in two interconnected directions. The first examines the place of the body in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, drawing particularly on the work of physician and psychoanalyst Dinora Pines and exploring connections between unconscious fantasy, embodiment, reproductive life, trauma and contemporary biomedical understandings of the body. The second concerns the reconstruction and contemporary relevance of Freudian metapsychology, including how metapsychological models are used in clinical thinking, how they can be taught and evaluated within psychotherapy and wider clinical education, and their potential dialogue with contemporary neuropsychoanalysis and other models of mind.

Lizaveta is co-editor of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis series with 1968 Press. 

Key Publications

van Munsteren, L. (2025). The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930–1980. Routledge. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6955-8844

Research Interests

• Psychoanalytic theory and metapsychology
• Psychoanalysis, neuropsychology, neuropsychoanalysis and psychophysiology
• Psychoanalysis, the body and medicine
• Embodiment and unconscious fantasy
• Psychotherapy and clinical education
• Cultural, social and political histories of psychoanalysis and mental health
• Archival and psychosocial research

Research Supervision

I welcome enquiries from students interested in theoretical, historical, qualitative and interdisciplinary research in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

I am particularly interested in supervising projects connected with two developing research programmes:

The body in psychoanalysis

Projects examining embodiment, unconscious fantasy and the psychological meanings of bodily processes, drawing particularly on the work of Dinora Pines, Françoise Dolto and Didier Anzieu.

Areas may include reproductive and sexual life, pregnancy, motherhood, infertility, menopause, trauma and ordinary bodily experience. Projects may also place psychoanalytic approaches in dialogue with contemporary research in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, reproductive mental health and general medicine.

Reconstructing metapsychology: models of mind, clinical thinking and neuropsychoanalysis

Projects exploring the contemporary relevance of Freudian metapsychology and its place in psychotherapy and wider clinical thinking. This includes research into how psychotherapists use metapsychological concepts in practice; how psychoanalytic models of mind can be reconstructed and taught within contemporary clinical education; and how metapsychology can be brought into dialogue with neuropsychoanalysis, neuroscience and other contemporary models of mental functioning.

I also welcome projects concerning the history of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, psychoanalytic archives, psychoanalysis and politics, and interdisciplinary encounters between psychoanalysis, psychology and medicine.

Research Groups

Postdoctoral Researcher, FREEPSY – Free Clinics and Psychoanalysis for the People, University of Essex

Teaching

Foundations in Clinical Psychotherapy
Module Lead, MSc Clinical Psychotherapy

Expertise and Public Engagement

Psychoanalysis; psychodynamic psychotherapy; metapsychology; history of psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis and medicine; embodiment; psychotherapy education.