Jane Haynes is a psychotherapist who originally trained as an actor at the Royal Court Theatre, but after reading The Divided Self and working with R.D. Laing at Kingsley Hall, she trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst. Jane has since detached herself from this orientation whose authoritarian position of the analyst she found to be limiting although she has not thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Jane now refers to herself as a relational psychotherapist who is always listening out for the unconscious. Jane is a founder member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. After Perestroika she regularly visited St Petersburg for ten years as consultant to the Eastern European Institute for Psychoanalysis where she helped to develop the clinical curriculum.

Jane works from the premise that psychotherapy needs to be a therapeutic dialogue between two equals and she considers that people not only have unspeakable experiences, or thoughts they may have been waiting to express all of their lives, but that such experiences can be made more unspeakable, more painful, by the absence of a trained listener as originally described by Adam Phillips. Using this modality she also co-convenes monthly meetings for GP’s and other consultants to explore their own lives rather than focussing on those of their patients. In other words a ‘play group’. She works with her daughter Tanya Haynes who is the director of The Blue Door Practice which they co-founded along with Dr Jamie Arkell FRCPsych. Tanya leads a multi-disciplined team of highly qualified practitioners.

Jane also offers mentoring consultations – independent to her work as a psychotherapist – exploring creativity and writer’s block.