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The much loved psychoanalyst Pearl King occupies a unique place in the hearts and minds of thousands of mental health professionals both here in Great Britain and abroad. A practising psychoanalyst for over 51 years, Miss
King has trained and supervised such a large proportion of the leading figures in British psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that it would be virtually impossible to quantify her influence on contemporary clinical psychotherapy.
Pearl King's multitudinous achievements deserve to be commemorated in monograph form, for she has contributed substantially to so many arenas within the field of psychoanalysis. A pioneering industrial psychologist in the 1940s, eager to improve the quality of life for members of the work-force, Miss King trained as a psychoanalyst, having chosen Dr John Rickman as her Training Analyst. Since qualification from the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in 1951, King has laboured tirelessly to promote the cause of psychoanalysis, both within the British Psycho-Analytical Society (serving as Deputy President to both Dr Wilfred Bion and Dr Donald Winnicott, and then years later as the first ever non-medical President), but also as Honorary Secretary to the International Psycho-Analytical Association.
Renowned for her frequently cited and path-breaking publications on analytical technique, and on the treatment of the older patient, amongst many other topics, King may be perhaps best known for her gargantuan contribution to the history of psychoanalysis. This includes her editorial work on the collected papers of John Rickman (1957), her joint editorship of the infamous ‘Controversial Discussions’ (King & Steiner 1991), and especially her impassioned creation of the Archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, a lovingly maintained repository for unpublished historical documents which has served as the role model for many other archives world-wide. Without recourse to the Archives established by Pearl King, many an historical text wo