{{Short description|First black UK psychoanalyst}} {{Infobox scientist |birth_date=1910 |birth_place=Okolona, Mississippi, U.S. |death_date={{Death year and age|1985|1910}} |death_place= |father=Wallace A. Battle |education= {{Plainlist| *Boston University (B.A.) *Smith College (MSW) *University of London (PhD, 1961) }} }} '''Marie Battle Singer''' (1910–1985) was an American-British psychotherapist, and the United Kingdom's first Black psychoanalyst.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Grosz |first=Stephen |authorlink=Stephen Grosz |title=Love's Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love |publisher=Penguin Random House |year=2026 |page=174}}</ref>
She was born in 1910 into a family of educators in Okolona, Mississippi.<ref name='clare'>{{Cite web |url=https://www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/marie-battle-singer-ph-d-1910-1985/ |title=Marie Battle Singer, Ph.D. (1910-1985) |website=Clare Hall |publisher=Cambridge University}}</ref> Her father was Wallace A. Battle, founder of the Okolona Industrial School.<ref name='clare' /> The Okolona Industrial School and Battle himself were the targets of racist harassment and violence in the 1920s, culminating in the murder of one of the school's teachers; the family fled North in the late 1920s.<ref name='clare' /><ref>Stolzer, Shaun. [https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&context=jmh "'The Castle That Battle Built': Okolona Industrial School and the Failure of Accommodation, 1902-1930"]. ''Journal of Mississippi History'', 86 (3), 2024. Pages 102-7</ref> Marie earned a bachelor's degree in English literature at Boston University, then joined her family in New York City, where she led a youth program at a Black YWCA chapter, among other jobs.<ref name='clare' /> Racism limited her employment opportunities.<ref name='clare' /> She was briefly married, changing her last name to Wills.<ref name='clare' />
She completed a master's degree in social work at Smith College, then, in 1948, took a job with the International Refugee Organization in Germany, where she helped to administer programs for refugee children.<ref name='clare' /> In Europe she found a sense of freedom that she hadn't experienced in the United States.<ref name='clare' /> In Germany she became aware of the work of Anna Freud, and in 1950 she moved to London to study at Freud's Hampstead Clinic, where she qualified in 1954 and worked as a therapist for several years.<ref name='childpsychotherapy'>{{Cite web |url=https://childpsychotherapy.org.uk/first-black-child-psychotherapist-marie-battle-singer |title=The first black child psychotherapist? - Marie Battle Singer |website=Association of Child Psychotherapists}}</ref> In the 1950s she also wrote a series of articles on adolescence for ''The Observer''.<ref name='childpsychotherapy' />
Through Karin Stephen, Singer socialized with the Bloomsbury Group, where she met her second husband, the poet and marine biologist Burns Singer.<ref name='jcp'>{{Cite journal |last=Bolt |first=Ann |url=https://pep-web.org/browse/document/jcptx.011b.0003a |title=In Memoriam Marie Battle Singer |journal=Journal of Child Psychotherapy |volume=11B(2) |issue=3 |year=1985}}</ref> In 1959, the couple moved to Cambridge, where she was the only practising child psychotherapist at the time.<ref name='jcp' /> She completed a PhD at the University of London in 1961.<ref name='clare' /> In addition to treating patients (in private practice and at Middlesex Hospital's Department of Child Psychiatry), she was a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and taught in Cambridge's Experimental Psychology department.<ref name='clare' /> She also conducted seminars for doctors in the Cambridge area, bringing new practitioners into psychiatry and psychoanalysis.<ref name='jcp' /> Burns Singer died in 1964.<ref name='clare' /> After several years of declining health, Marie Battle Singer died in 1985.<ref name='clare' /> Clare Hall has a scholarship fund in her name.<ref name='clare' />
==References== {{reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Singer, Marie Battle}} Category:1910 births Category:1985 deaths Category:20th-century African-American people Category:20th-century African-American women Category:20th-century American people Category:20th-century American women Category:20th-century Black British people Category:20th-century Black British women Category:20th-century British psychologists Category:20th-century British women Category:Alumni of the University of London Category:American emigrants to the United Kingdom Category:American psychoanalysts Category:Boston University alumni Category:British psychoanalysts Category:People from Okolona, Mississippi Category:Smith College School for Social Work alumni Category:British people of African-American descent
==External links== *[https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/news/marie-battle-singer-incredible-story-britains-first-black-psychoanalyst "Marie Battle Singer: the incredible story of Britain’s first black psychoanalyst"]. Wolfson College, Cambridge.