John Southgate 1934-2021

On 24 April 2021, John Southgate, one of the United Kingdom's most creative and ground-breaking psychotherapists, died peacefully at the age of 86 years. A true pioneer of our profession, John championed both attachment theory and trauma theory, long before these arenas of thought had become standard practice. With his partner, Kate White, and a group of forward-thinking colleagues, he laid the foundations for the creation of The Bowlby Centre, named in honour of his much-cherished clinical supervisor, Dr John Bowlby, thus foregrounding the impact of early parent-infant attachment relationships and their long-term consequences.

Born in Carlton, Nottinghamshire, John Southgate grew up in a progressive, working-class, intercultural family, the only child of a Jewish mother and a Protestant father. After his schooling, Southgate worked for several years as a filing clerk and subsequently as a cost accountant, eventually enrolling in London's Garnett College at the age of 30, as a mature student. He subsequently earned a master's degree in management from the University of Sussex, and was soon appointed to lecture at the Polytechnic of North London (forerunner of London Metropolitan University), during which time he founded a blue-sky Diploma in Advanced Behavioural Science, teaching psychological theory to chief executive officers keen to enhance their understanding of workplace psychodynamics.

Southgate expanded his knowledge base by studying the writings of numerous forward-thinking psychoanalytical practitioners such as Dr Karen Horney, who championed not only a reconfiguration of female psychology but also the concept of ‘self analysis’. Southgate, steeped in Marxist theory, and the championship of equality, challenged the more elitist approach to psychoanalysis and began to develop the field of psychodynamically orientated peer counselling, thus making psychotherapeutic concepts more widely available at a time when few dared to speak about psychotherapy openly and i