“What is Brave is Being Part of a Majority and Standing Out, Not Being Normal”: Remembering Lennox Thomas

Lennox Thomas (1952-2020) was born in Grenada and moved to the UK aged six, living firstly in Stavely, Derbyshire and, later, in Nottingham. Having trained as a social worker, he worked initially with children in institutional care. Lennox's next position was in the probation service; he was the first senior probation officer of Afro-Caribbean origin to be appointed in the UK. Further to his training in child and family psychotherapy, Lennox qualified as an individual psychoanalytic psychotherapist with the British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP) in 1985. In 1990, he was awarded an MA in social policy.

From 1992-1999 Lennox was the Clinical Director of Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre and Co-Director of the MSc in Intercultural Psychotherapy at University College London. He was a founder of the Refugee Therapy Centre in 1999 where he was a consultant psychotherapist until 2018. He was an honorary fellow of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) and a senior member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation (BPF). Lennox was one of a small number of Black psychoanalytic psychotherapists in the UK and he both contributed to several psychoanalytic trainings and supervised trainees and qualified psychotherapists. He was a prolific speaker and writer.

Throughout his work as a relational, intercultural, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Lennox's deep respect for his patients, his sensitivity to their vulnerabilities, his attentiveness to the uniqueness of their speaking, and his attunement to the complexities of their suffering, including their experiences of discrimination, were very evident. He was consistent in his challenges to societal and psychoanalytic notions of “normality” or “maturity” associated with, for example, whiteness, class, heterosexuality, and specific gender roles.

In his clinical work, Lennox implicitly deconstructed the binaries of traditional psychoanalytic theorizing: internal/external; mind/body. He stressed that appreciation of the sociopoli