Valerie Sinason is a British psychotherapist who, between 1979 and the early '90s, demonstrated that severely developmentally-disabled people could benefit by psychoanalysis. She also recognized early on that most developmentally-disabled people had been victims of sexual abuse, something not recognized at the time but now widely accepted. She saw her patients as having a secondary handicap resulting from their attempts to adapt to society's attitudes toward them. In 1998 she established the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, where she works with patients with dissociative identity disorder.