Marie Battle Singer

Marie Battle Singer (1910–1985) was an American-British psychotherapist, and the United Kingdom's first Black psychoanalyst.

She was born in 1910 into a family of educators in Okolona, Mississippi. Her father was Wallace A. Battle, founder of the Okolona Industrial School. 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. In the 1950s she also wrote a series of articles on adolescence for The Observer. In 1959, the couple moved to Cambridge, where she was the only practising child psychotherapist at the time. She completed a PhD at the University of London in 1961. 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. She also conducted seminars for doctors in the Cambridge area, bringing new practitioners into psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Burns Singer died in 1964. After several years of declining health, Marie Battle Singer died in 1985. Clare Hall has a scholarship fund in her name.