Curriculum vitae

Elfriede Löchel has been Professor for Theoretical Psychoanalysis at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin since 2012. She was a Visiting Professor there from 2010 to 2012. She gained her diploma in psychology at the University of Heidelberg in 1978 and accompanied it by studies in philosophy and German literature. She spent a year doing research in developmental and social psychology at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford (1978-79). Then she worked in various jobs as a psychologist in Heidelberg and Bremen. She was a  research assistant at Bremen University from 1989 to 1995. Her doctoral thesis (1988) at Bremen was a theoretical study of concepts of difference in psychoanalytical theories of gender identity. Her habilitation thesis (1995) was a qualitative empirical-hermeneutic study of subjective meanings and fantasies in relation to the computer. She taught developmental and social psychology, qualitative research methods and clinical psychology at the University of Bremen (1985-2010), Freie Universität Berlin (1995-2000) and Technische Universität Berlin (2000). Between 2002 and 2010 she established the “Forum for psychoanalytic research” at Bremen University.

Elfriede Löchel is a psychoanalyst and training analyst (GPA/IPA). She is one of the Editors of the periodical “Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse” and a peer-reviewer of the journal “Psyche”. She was the President of the Bremen Psychoanalytic Association from 2008 to 2012.

• Conceptual research and (re-)readings of Freud
• Psychoanalytic epistemology and research methods
• Theory of gender
• Psychoanalytic research on media
• Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary theory of symbolisation