Josephine Klein: 1926-2018

Josephine Klein, who died at the end of 2018 aged 92, was well known to many psychotherapists, who read her books, heard her speak or whom she taught. We first met in 1963 when I lived next to her at Nuffield, a postgraduate college for social scientists at Oxford University.

Josephine was formidably clever and widely read; she had gained two BA degrees in four years, in French at UCL, and then in Sociology at the LSE. But from the start she had been equally interested in practical action, having become involved in youth work and boys clubs. Her trenchant and personal style, in both speaking and writing, were to carry her out of academic life and into a long series of pioneering projects, among them the Archway venture in Brighton, the Community and Youth Work project at Goldsmith's College, and finally psychotherapy and the Refugee Therapy Centre. Her first books were on the theory and practice of working with groups, which she taught widely in universities and to a growing following of social and community workers. When we met she had just finished an important two-volume work, Samples from English Cultures (Klein, 1965). I focus on it because even now many of its lessons have not been learned.

At the time, sociology in Britain was dominated by the question of why working-class children were less successful in the educational system than their measured intelligence suggested. What Samples did was to create a cartography of social class in Britain; to relate together the existing studies of people in particular communities and occupations with what was known about their childrearing practices, how these affected their adult personalities and how they fared in life. Conscious of the limited and partial nature of the available data - which is why the book is called Samples - she outlined the extraordinary complexity of the English class system, whose rigidity and widespread influence had struck her very forcibly compared to her childhood in Holland. She raised importan