W. Marshall Wheeler

Dr William Marshall Wheeler died on January 30, 1986, at his home in California at the age of 67.

He trained as a child psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre, where I too was a student, in the early fifties and this was the beginning of a long friendship with him and his wife Dorothy.

Marshall Wheeler was born in Reno, Nevada, but spent his early years in Santa Barbara, attending local schools and graduating from Santa Barbara College, before going on to earn his doctorate in psychology at UCLA.

He served in Europe in World War II, and returned to England in 1953. There he worked for about a year in Dr John Bowlby's Research on the effects of mother—child separation, before commencing training at the Anna Freud Centre (then known as The Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic).

Subsequently he returned to Los Angeles where he joined the Reiss Davis Clinic. Dr Rocco Motto headed it at that period and engaged Marshall as Director of Research. In this capacity he participated in a project devoted to the study of autistic children, having always had an exceptional affection for, and empathy with, such children. The Clinic began to expand and, as further students enrolled, he was asked to become more active in the training programme. This included sessions with the diagnostic team, assignment of cases and setting up of supervision. Students found him an exacting taskmaster but admitted they learned a great deal from him.

Marshall had been closely associated with the Reiss Davis for twenty-eight years when the Clinic moved and a new, Jungian Director was appointed. While Marshall was somewhat unwilling to abandon such a long and loyal commitment, he finally accepted an invitation from the Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies to join them as a training analyst and supervisor. In spite of increasing ill-health, he worked with this group until his retirement in 1982, giving seminars and supervision to psychologists and psychiatric social workers in training. At this point h