Krystyna Bielecka
I am a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a philosopher. I am interested in what is hardest to grasp in human experience: how the unconscious gives shape to our thoughts, feelings and relationships.
As a psychotherapist
I completed a four-year training in the Kleinian tradition at the Hanna Segal Institute of Psychoanalytic Studies in Warsaw. The psychotherapy I practise is supervised by experienced psychoanalytic psychotherapists. I work within a stable, regular frame, in my consulting room at Belgradzka 12, near Natolin metro, and online.
As a philosopher
I am a philosopher by training, working on one of the classic epistemological questions: what is the relation between reality and thought. I pursue it within contemporary philosophy of mind — asking how mental representations can relate to reality, and how what represents can go wrong. These questions matter for cognitive science, psychology, ethology, psychiatry and research on artificial intelligence.
I also work on these questions as an assistant professor in the Department of Epistemology and Cognitive Science at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Białystok. This double experience — clinical and philosophical — shapes how I listen in the consulting room: with attention to meaning, to the role of misunderstanding oneself, and to how difficult experience asks to be given sense.
Academic path
I carried out the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) PRELUDIUM grant The Significance of the Concept of Misrepresentation in Contemporary Theories of Mental Representation (2013–2016), and then a project in the NCN SONATA programme, Psychopathologies from the Perspective of Anti-representationalism: A Critical Analysis. One result of the first grant is the monograph Błądzę, więc myślę (I Err, Therefore I Think), published in 2019; its English edition appeared with Springer Nature in the SAPERE series. I also took part in the project What is Thinking in Images?, led by Dr Piotr Kozak.
I defended my doctoral thesis, "The Significance of the Concept of Misrepresentation in Theories of Mental Representation", supervised by Prof. Katarzyna Paprzycka-Hausman, in 2016 at the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the University of Warsaw. Since 2020 I have been associated with the Department of Epistemology and Cognitive Science at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Białystok. From 2020 to 2023 I held a scholarship from the Minister of Science and Higher Education for outstanding young scientists.
Teaching
I teach philosophy and cognitive science students:
- Philosophy of Psychiatry
- Contemporary Philosophy of Mind
- Cognitive Representations