Hello, I'm Alicia, but you can call me Alice

I’m an essayist and independent researcher based near Barcelona, Spain. I write about culture, symbolism, and the difficult human experiences we struggle to put into words: loss, motherhood, belonging, fragmentation, and the lives we leave behind.

The Gothic is a language I use to think. Haunted houses, ghosts, monsters, and descents offer ways to explore what a family, an institution, or a culture contains and what it cannot make room for.

My essays bring literature, film, mythology, and Jungian and post-Jungian thought into conversation with lived experience. I’m particularly interested in losses that receive little recognition, the persistence of what seems to have disappeared, and the structures that shape who we are allowed to become.

The questions that keep returning in my work include:

- What happens to grief when there is no recognised place for it?

- When does the structure that protects us begin to prevent our growth?

- Whose experience is missing from the stories we inherit?

- What do our monsters reveal about the cultures that create them?

These questions underpin The Gothic Descent, my independent editorial and cultural research project. Through essays, seasonal editions, books, and reading resources, I develop tools for thinking through difficult experiences with culture. I want to create work readers can return to, question, and bring into conversation with their own lives.

My background and publications

I hold a degree in English Philology from the Universitat de Barcelona and a Master’s in Jungian Psychology from Universidad Nebrija. I have undertaken further Jungian studies through the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies and am currently undertaken a Master's degree in grief and bereavement.

Before concentrating on writing, I spent many years teaching English and ran my own language academy for a decade. That experience continues to inform my interest in education, language, and how we learn to think.

My published academic contributions include:

- Women in Supernatural: Critical Essays — McFarland. My chapter, The Misunderstood Role of Mary Winchester as a Fragmented Self, explores Mary Winchester through identity, motherhood, death, and the fragmented self.

- Horror and Mother/hoods in Global Cultural Imaginaries: Representations Across Literature, Film, Television, and Art — Demeter Press. My chapter, The Monstrous Mother brings motherhood, loss, and psychological haunting into conversation through a Gothic-Jungian lens.

I have also contributed and co-authored Diario para madres escritoras II, un nuevo comienzo.

I am currently working on an essay on The Great Mother archetype in the television series Dark for the forthcoming collection Horror and Rewilding, edited by Simon Bacon.

Alongside my essays, I am writing a collection of eight Gothic stories in Spanish.

What you’ll find here

On Medium, I share essays that begin with a story, an image, a cultural tension, or an experience that refuses to settle. From there, I follow the connections and ask what they might help us understand.

You don’t need a background in Gothic literature or Jungian psychology to join the conversation. Curiosity and a willingness to stay with a difficult question, is a good place to begin.

Explore my publications and The Gothic Descent: https://www.gothicalice.com/