Background and Formation

Krisna Catsaras is Founder and Principal Consultant of KCGA. He is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, adult psychotherapist, and group analyst. He trained at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, where he completed a four-year full-time clinical training in child and adolescent psychotherapy, and at the Institute of Group Analysis, where he trained for a further five years and qualified as a group analyst and adult psychotherapist. His earlier training included a postgraduate diploma in psychoanalytic observational studies at the Tavistock and an MSc in psychoanalytic developmental psychology at the Anna Freud Centre and UCL. This is a formation shaped by three intersecting traditions — psychoanalysis, group analysis, and systems-psychodynamics — and it is that combination, developed across nearly three decades of clinical and institutional practice, that informs the consulting work.

His career began in direct residential care, managing a unit for adolescents with complex emotional and psychological needs in a therapeutic community school — an experience that grounded his subsequent clinical and organisational thinking in the lived realities of institutional life from the outset. He has since worked across a wide range of NHS settings — including CAMHS, looked-after children and adoption services, services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, community mental health, and adolescent services — as well as schools, NGOs, and international training contexts, consistently operating at the intersection of clinical practice, group work, and institutional life.

At the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, he held a range of senior roles across both clinical and educational functions. These included serving as assessment tutor and a member of the management team for the clinical doctorate in child and adolescent psychotherapy, and as a core team member and experiential groups lead on the master's programme in Consulting and Leading in Organisations — a programme focused specifically on leadership and organisational dynamics. He contributed to curriculum development, diversity strategy, and the supervision of trainees across both master's and doctoral programmes. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a past editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy.

Krisna also maintains a private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, working with children, adolescents, young adults, and adults. While that practice is separate from KCGA, the clinical formation it represents — the understanding of unconscious process, human development, and what people do under pressure — is the same formation that underpins this work.

The three strands of his professional life — clinical practice, group analysis, and organisational consulting — have developed in parallel over many years and across very different contexts. It is that combination, and the thinking it has made possible, that gives KCGA's work its particular character and depth.

Associates

KCGA draws on a small network of experienced associates where the scope or nature of the work requires it. Associates are selected for the depth of their formation and the relevance of their experience to the work in hand — not as a roster of available consultants but as colleagues whose thinking and practice are genuinely complementary to the work KCGA offers.

Current associates bring expertise across a range of contexts and disciplines: forensic and criminal justice settings, including work with young people in custody and consultation to forensic teams; fostering, adoption, and looked-after children services; inpatient and community adolescent mental health; adult mental health; integrated services for children and young people with disabilities, complex developmental needs, and autism spectrum conditions; diversity, equity, and inclusion at institutional level; and executive coaching alongside psychotherapeutic formation. Several hold or have held senior clinical and educational roles at leading training institutions, and bring to the associate relationship the same combination of clinical depth and organisational experience that characterises KCGA's work.