Leila Chakravarti

I currently have availability for new clients.

I work on-line via Zoom or by phone, but will be starting face-to-face sessions in Greenwich SE10 in 2026. 

I am a psychodynamic counsellor with an MA from Goldsmith University in Psychodynamic Counselling. I offer sessions in both Arabic and English. 

My approach involves a collaborative, inter-cultural perspective, looking closely at deep personal complexities associated with the many challenges of navigating life while straddling multiple cultural frameworks. I work with adults on issues including identity, cultural displacement, intergenerational and cultural conflict, relationship difficulties, emotional abuse, anxiety, stress, sexuality and trauma related to faith issues and complex family dynamics.

Born and initially educated in Egypt, I have made my home in the UK for over thirty years, first as a higher education student and then as a working professional. Before  training as a psychotherapist, I spent two decades as an academic ethnographer, living and working alongside communities navigating profound social change.  - training, researching and teaching here, while continuing to travel and work extensively across the Arab Middle East. This dual rootedness has given me a first-hand understanding of the everyday realities and pressures shaping people's lives on both sides of that experience.

Throughout my work as an ethnographer, one skill above all others was foundational: the ability to listen – actively, deeply, patiently, and without judgement — to people's own accounts of their lives, their struggles, and their hopes. My subsequent training in Psychodynamic Counselling has given rigorous professional shape to those skills, enabling me to explore interactively and introspectively with clients their emotional life, how their past shapes their present, and how they can change things for the future.

Potential clients are invited to send me a confidential email at the address shown, so that we can agree a time for an initial 30 minutes discussion (on-line/phone, without fee). Further sessions, as agreed, will be of 1 hour’s duration, at the fees stated.