Obituaries

Stanley Wiseberg was not as well known among psychoanalysts as his contributions to the Freudian tradition deserved. Although he was associated from the late 1960s to the late 1980s with clinical research and conceptual studies at the Anna Freud Centre, he worked quietly and unobtrusively, enriching the contributions of others through the stringently disciplined thinking he brought to bear on the subject of investigation. His was one of the best psychoanalytic minds, and could bring insight and lucidity to everyday psychological matters as well as the most recherché of clinical conditions.

His early contributions to the work of the Centre were, characteristically, collaborative and concerned a pilot study of ten cases of ‘mainline’ heroin addiction, carefully selected according to rigorous criteria. In collecting the data, he worked closely with Pat Radford, who took from relatives the most detailed of family histories, while Wiseberg himself interviewed all the patients in depth. On the basis of this material, Diagnostic Profiles were constructed with his co-workers, and resulted in preliminary publications pending deeper analytic knowledge (Radford et al., 1972; Wiseberg et al., 1975).

These studies stemmed from a deep interest in psychoanalytic diagnosis, fostered largely by the work of Anna Freud and her Diagnostic Profile. He took the view that a number of conditions refractory to clinical psychoanalysis could still be studied through a disciplined use of the Profile, though such investigations would always lack the confirmation that could only be gained through the analytic process itself. The serious addictive syndromes provided an obvious field for investigations using the Profile as a research tool. To quote:

…It soon became evident that the Profile provided a standardized structure for the fullest possible assessment of the patient within the limits of the available data. Since this structure is known and reproducible by psychoanalytically trained clinical re