Draft:Mary Target

Mary Target, now Mary Hepworth, is a British psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and clinical psychologist. She works as a university lecturer and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. She has been the chair of several committees at University College London, the British Psycho-Analytical Society, the British Psychological Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Education
Target initially studied medicine at the University of Oxford. She then changed faculty and studied psychology, which she completed with a Bachelor of Arts with honors in 1977. She then completed her Master of Science in 1979, also at Oxford. This was followed by a doctorate in psychology at Oxford and at the University of London in 1993.

Academic career
Mary Target has maintained a private practice for her entire career. From 2003 until 2013, she worked as professional director of the Anna Freud Centre. She believes that the work of Sigmund and Anna Freud have important legacies even though modern research has progressed beyond many of their theories. When asked what Anna Freud would think of current psychoanalogy research, Mary Target said "I would have thought that she would see it as appropriate that we have changed with the times." Target wrote an open letter in 2010, signed by 54 scientific researchers, in defense of psychoanalysis.

Mary Target is a lecturer and doctoral supervisor at University College London. Target is chair of the research committee of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

As a colleague of Peter Fonagy, she was significantly involved in the development of the concept of mentalization, which describes the individual's ability to assess the intentions of other people. She has fostered collaboration between Yale School of Medicine and the Anna Freud Centre, and she has researched depression in youth.