Lara Lagutina

I feel honoured to be invited to serve as UK Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. I have been reading the journal for many years, long before joining the Editorial Board, and have experienced it as a place of exceptional clinical relevance and depth. Many of the papers published in the JAP have accompanied me in my own analytic work, helping me think more deeply about clinical impasses, developmental processes and the lived texture of analytic relationships. I very much enjoyed my years on the Editorial Board marked by thoughtful and lively collegial exchange with analysts from different cultural and clinical traditions, and it is this spirit of dialogue, rigour and mutual learning that I am keen to support and sustain in my editorial role.

I am a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology in London, where I also serve as Deputy Director of Training, and I am a clinical psychologist. I was born in Latvia and trained initially in psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University, where I first encountered analytical psychology and felt a strong and enduring pull towards it. In the 1990s I participated in an intensive Jungian programme in Zurich for trainees from Eastern Europe, an experience that was both formative and deeply inspiring. I later became a founding member of the Moscow Society of Analytical Psychology and was involved in organising the first Jungian training there. After moving to the UK, I completed my doctoral training in clinical psychology and wrote my doctoral dissertation on the subject of using Jungian sandplay in working with somatic symptoms and physical illness. As part of that project, I interviewed Sandplay therapists from across the globe and was deeply moved by the clinical material they shared, some of which later informed my chapter ‘Facing death: Sandplay at the threshold’ in The Routledge International Handbook of Sandplay Therapy.

As part of my interest in trauma and the body, I also trained in Somatic Experiencing and EMDR.

My clinical and theoretical interests centre on early states of mind, early and developmental trauma, regression, and the embodied dimensions of analytic work. I am particularly drawn to unformulated layers of experience, unconscious communication, the psychoid dimension of the psyche and synchronicity, and to analysis as a process of shared dreaming. Over the years, I have been closely involved in teaching, writing and developing and delivering training and CPD courses internationally, reflecting my longstanding commitment to dialogue across cultures and to supporting clinicians in finding their own analytic voice. Beyond my professional life, I have a long-standing love of classical ballet, dance, walking and trekking, and find renewal and inspiration in nature and by the sea.

Publications:

Lagutina, L. (2024). Working with Early Relational Trauma and Borderline States: The Role of Unconscious Communication. In: The Complexity of Trauma: Jungian and Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Treatment of Trauma. Eds. Zoppi, L. & Schmidt, M., Oxon & New York: Routledge.

Lagutina, L. (2023). Clinical commentaries. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 68, 1, 171–176

Lagutina, L. (2022). The psychoid dimension and synchronicity in working with early relational trauma: the role of unconscious communication, enactments, somatic symptoms and dreams. Buenos Aires 2022 Analytical Psychology Opening to the Changing World: Contemporary Perspectives on Clinical, Scientific, Social, Cultural and Environmental Issues, Proceedings of the XXII IAAP Congress. Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag.

Lagutina, L. (2021) Meeting the orphan: early relational trauma, synchronicity and the psychoid. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 66, 1, 5-27.

Lagutina, L. (2017). “Facing death: Sandplay at the threshold” 
The Routledge International Handbook of Sandplay Therapy, Ed. B. Turner, London & New York: Routledge.

Lagutina, L., Spelinger, D., & Esterhuyzen, A. (2013). Addressing psychological aspects of physical problems through Sandplay: a grounded theory study of therapists’ views. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 86, 105–124.