Elisabeth Young-Bruehl 1946-2011

There is a rare group of speakers who can hold the attention of their audience so powerfully that no one wants the lecture to stop. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was one of those exceptional people. She was a warm and compassionate woman whose sharp intelligence and lively curiosity never ceased to fascinate. Her knowledge was extensive, drawing as it did on a wide range of interests and on her unwavering passions for the human rights of people to pursue unfettered whatever form of creativity they sought. She began in academic philosophy and then moved more and more into politics and into psychoanalysis. The combination of all three interests and capabilities produced a remarkably gifted and versatile human being.

Her recent and sudden death at the age of 65 came as a major shock to all who knew her. Only last November, a mere month before she died, we had the privilege of listening to her at an Anna Freud Colloquium talking about her new work on Winnicott and her views on his relationship with Anna Freud. We were enthralled and some of us in the British Association of Psychotherapists hurried to invite her to speak again in the spring, an invitation she readily accepted.

It is no surprise that, in extending her skills to biography, she should have chosen Hannah Arendt in 1982 and Anna Freud in 1988 as her subjects. Both were women of considerable stature in their respective fields - Hannah Arendt in political theory, Anna Freud in child psychoanalysis. Both were Jewish refugees who had suffered and fled from the abominations of the Nazi regime. The nature of the human condition, the life of the mind and the plight of the vulnerable became matters of deep concern to both. And, in the pursuit of these interests, they brought formidable intellect and determination.

Both biographies received high acclaim, applauded for their exemplary mastery of both the facts and the cultures of the two women's lives. It is tribute to Young-Bruehl that they so entrusted her to permit entry into