Oliver James (psychologist)

Oliver James (born 1953) is a chartered psychologist, registered with the British Psychological Society. He is also registered as a Relational Psychoanalyst at the Bowlby Centre. He is an author, journalist, television producer and broadcaster.

Following a degree in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, he trained as a child clinical psychologist at Nottingham University and worked for six years at the NHS Cassel Hospital in Richmond in a clinical psychologist post.

He has written columns for The Sun, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Express, The Independent, The Observer magazine and The Guardian Family section. He also contributes regularly to the Comment page of The Guardian, as well as occasional articles for the other broadsheets.

Speaking on Channel 4's 2013 "Psychopath Night", James described the credit crunch as a "mass outbreak of corporate psychopathy which resulted in something that very nearly crashed the whole world economy".

In 1982 James made his first television series, for Granada for the ITV network, about childcare (Under Fives). He made two further educational series, one for Channel 4 (Sex With Paula, 1987) and one for ITV (Men On Violence, 1988, for LWT). He originated and was associate producer of the ITV documentary "The Man who shot John Lennon".

He was the interviewer and producer of the 44 interviews in Room 113 for the two series of the BAFTA-award winning Network 7 youth programme on Channel 4. Room 113 was the most popular slot in the programme and the interviews were described by Chris Dunckley in the Financial Times as "The most frank since John Freeman's Face-to-Face in the Fifties".

In 1990 he produced a documentary for Channel 4 about the Mail on Sunday and in 1992 he contributed three films, two as Producer and one as Producer-Presenter, to the BBC 2 Crime and Punishment season. Rape, for 40 Minutes, recorded the meeting of a rapist and a rape victim. Prisoner XYY/334422, also for 40 Minutes, was about the psychology of an imprisoned psychopath. Wot U Looking At?, for the science programme Horizon, presented his highly influential explanation (from his monograph "Juvenile Violence in a Winner-Loser Culture") for why the poor are more violent than the rich and why, at the time, violence had been rocketing since 1987 in the UK.

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