Rosie Parker 1945-2010

Over the decades that Rosie Parker and I were friends, we shared many joys and sorrows and political, cultural and personal tumult. Those were exciting, even heady decades and they brought with them both love and loss. But although initially having taken distinct paths - Rosie into feminist art history and I into child psychotherapy and latterly psychoanalysis - it was only in the second of those decades, from 1987 onwards, when Rosie trained and worked as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, that the specificity of one of the central lynchpins of the relationship really emerged. Rosie's clinical work and writing became her main professional preoccupation for the rest of her life. She was able, in so mature and creative a way, to bring to her work not just a deeply felt clinical commitment, but also a freshness and depth derived from her distinguished accomplishments in other areas of life. Creative patients, in particular, encountered in Rosie a very special receptive ear, one finely attuned to the many registers of the artistic personality

Aside from the personal bonds - particularly around being mothers, having children and pursuing multiple friendships - we learned the meaning of true collaboration. This took three forms: that of confidential discussion of difficult clinical situations; that of supervision and referral; and that of our respective writing, in terms of literary and theoretical perspectives.

In relation to the referrals I made to her over time, I was absolutely confident not only about her clinical expertise, intuitive subtlety and soundness of practice, but also about the need, in each such case, for a particular quality of being, for an unusually deep, creative and aesthetic appreciation of the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship. When she became ill I saw some of these patients for consultation and each time my anticipation of the rich and what, more than once, was described as ‘life-saving’ work was confirmed. But it was the collaborative writi