Amal Treacher Kabesh: 1954-2022

I was asked by the Editor of the British Journal of Psychotherapy to write a short piece on Amal Treacher Kabesh, who died in January 2022, focusing on ‘Amal's cultural work in psychoanalysis’. That seemed at the time a very good idea, but now I find that - like Amal, perhaps - I can only really write personally. So with apologies to Ann Scott, I will try to mimic Amal's systematic conviction that it is the process of emotional reflection that allows one to speak of and through psychoanalysis. Not only is the ‘personal political’, as framed by Amal's many years of working in the Feminist Review editorial group, but the political, the psychoanalytic and the psychosocial were all for her personal too, lived realities that only in that way can make sense of experience.

Amal and I were almost exactly the same age, just three weeks between us - she liked to pretend we were twins and it often felt that way. We even accidentally had the same analyst, though not at the same time; so psychoanalytic siblings at least! We knew each other well from the original Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conferences; I examined her PhD; we worked together at Birkbeck in the early 2000s, between her posts at the University of East London and at Nottingham, when she led our partnership with the Institute of Family Therapy; and we stayed close-at-a-distance once she left Birkbeck in 2005. I last saw her at the online Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conference in September 2021 when she seemed well and was settling into retirement in Cairo alongside her husband; as ever, she chaired the panel I was on with warmth and acuity - and as ever, we were siblings together for an hour or so. Many of our academic interests were similar, from adoptive identities in the 1990s through to masculinities and postcoloniality in more recent times. She became more embedded in Egypt and interested in her Muslim identity; not long ago, just pre-pandemic, we filled two of the three slot