Jan Lee: A Tribute

Jan Lee, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, has died from metastatic breast cancer. She had worked for the last 25 years as a therapist in a variety of settings, within charitable organizations and with patients who do not usually access private therapy, including bereavement work, youth counselling, student counselling and running a community-based counselling service. For 11 years she was a senior NHS psychotherapist in primary care in Ealing, West London.

Jan was an Exhibitioner in Modern Languages at Newnham College, Cambridge. She later trained as a counsellor at South West London Polytechnic, and then completed analytic trainings at The Guild of Psychotherapists and the Society for Analytical Psychology. She greatly valued her connections with both Guild and SAP, ‘like having two homes, different in character and ambience and situated in different localities’. She contributed to the SAP's Public Programme Committee, represented the Society on the BPC Council, and was recently co-opted onto the Council of the SAP. At The Guild she was Chair successively of the External Affairs Committee and the Low Fee Clinic. The latter was particularly close to her heart, in bringing psychotherapy to a disadvantaged South London borough. She played an important role in improvements to make the Clinic more accessible to those with disabilities.

She was in private practice in Chiswick, working variously from Brief Focal Psychotherapy to long-term four-times-weekly analysis. In her teaching work she drew on passions for world mythology, Sufism, Shamanism, the I Ching, astronomy, astrological symbolism, film and music. She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a colleague and a good friend to many.

Such a list - an incomplete one - perhaps gives an indication of the gusto with which Jan committed herself. Having survived polio as a child, she believed in life and in the beauty of life. She was a perfectionist with a desire to get things right. Once committed, she fol