Valerie Sinason

Valerie Sinason is a British psychotherapist who, between 1979 and the early '90s, demonstrated that severely developmentally-disabled people could benefit by psychoanalysis. She also recognized early on that most developmentally-disabled people had been victims of sexual abuse, something not recognized at the time but now widely accepted. She saw her patients as having a secondary handicap resulting from their attempts to adapt to society's attitudes toward them.

She began work with the Subnormality Workshop at the Tavistock Clinic in 1979, under the direction of Neville Symington. She was an early user of the term "emotional intelligence", and focused on that rather than intellect in her work with her patients.

In 1998 she established the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, where she works with patients with dissociative identity disorder.

She is the author of ten books and over 60 papers. She is a registrant of the British Psychoanalytic Council.