Lionel Monteith

Lionel Monteith, the founder of the Lincoln Clinic & Institute for Psychotherapy, died suddenly on January 15th 1991. Lionel was born in 1921, and lived in Southborough and Brighton. His childhood was unhappy and the scars of these early years left Lionel prone to quite severe bouts of depression. It was only through psychoanalysis and his marriage that these wounds could begin to heal.

He left school at 15 and trained as a Quantity Surveyor. In 1953 he married Mary Huson, who was at the time a clinical tutor and antenatal sister at the London Hospital Annexe, and so began a long and creative marriage in which Mary played an essential part in encouraging Lionel's true gifts as both a psychotherapist and an administrator to emerge. Lionel had by this time found psychological help from Dr Percy Backus - he was later to have a long analysis with Dr Ladislaw Haas who had been an analysand of Otto Fenichel - and he was beginning to realise how essential therapy had been to him. He saw how limited this type of help still was for the majority of people, and he determined to try and do something about this. He thought that he might be able to help people best through the ministry. He enrolled at New College, London, and because of Mary's financial support, he was able to study for the next four years. He obtained a diploma in theology and in 1957, four days after his twin son and daughter had been born, he was ordained, and became the Congregational Minister at West Kensington. For the next seven years he tried to find a way in which he could incorporate his psycho-analytic experience into his pastoral duties. The Reverend Dr Leslie Weatherhead and the Reverend Dr Harry Guntrip were among his friends at this time, and they also were trying to create similar links. It became increasingly difficult to find the time to combine both jobs, Lionel was by this time working part-time as an affiliated psychotherapist at University College Hospital, but also he discovered that the Chu