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Psychoanalysis with Isabel Menzies Lyth, which began for me in 1980 in Oxford, was an immensely powerful experience that introduced me to a revelatory new way of thinking as well as bringing upheaval and undoubtedly deep-seated change to my life. Isabel was a highly sensitive analyst with a simple, sparing method. She was very aware of human inclinations, failings or moral weakness, but not likely to give way to them. The most singular feature of my analysis with her was the way she could look at loss and at hidden or psychotic forces, making sense of them in relation to the mainstream of life. My analysis with her was however regrettably short because I moved to London to continue the child psychotherapy training, and I still feel a loss because of my decision. I owe Isabel a great and lasting debt.
Later I visited Isabel many times in Oxford and she was generous with advice about my ongoing training and papers I wrote. She met my wife and children and we enjoyed her hospitality, now able to chat and exchange views on many things. One time she told me about her (second) analysis with Wilfred Bion, which she described as ‘the one that mattered’. She was understandably reticent about her analysis, but I was struck how her major work on containment of anxiety in institutions followed so closely Bion's work on ‘containment’. Like Bion she knew the real power of the unconscious. She also was realistically aware of the power of human denial and disavowal. She shunned overvaluations or self-idealization, but she remains for me, and I'm sure for many others, a unique person and a most gifted psychoanalyst.
Denis Flynn
Psychoanalyst and Child Analyst / Psychotherapist (ACP), British Psychoanalytical Society