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My colleague and friend, the psychotherapist, author and campaigner Paul Gordon, has died aged 70. While eschewing the limelight, Gordon was an influential and unique voice in the world of contemporary psychotherapy. Author of over 10 books, and multiple articles, he was for many years Chair of the Philadelphia Association, originally founded by the brilliant if mercurial R.D. Laing.
He wrote a number of papers in the BJP, perhaps most notably in the early days about race and psychoanalysis, such as Souls in Armour: Thoughts on psychoanalysis and Racism (Gordon, 1993a) and Keeping Therapy White (Gordon, 1993b), as well as works linking psychotherapy and the arts such as The Celluloid Couch: Representations of Psychotherapy in Cinema (Gordon, 1994).
The papers about race and politics were part of his transition from a more campaigning early adulthood into a socially informed psychotherapy. Born in Glasgow in 1954 to Stanley Gordon, businessman, and Wilma Donaldson, speech and play therapist at psychoanalytically informed Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic, Paul attended St. Aloysius College and then studied jurisprudence at Glasgow University. He then worked at the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties where he organized the first Scottish Conference on Children's Rights in 1978, and remarkably took the case that ended corporal punishment in Scottish schools to the European Court of Human Rights, ending the use of the dreaded tawse (leather belt).
In 1980, Paul moved to London to work for the Runnymede Trust, where his prolific campaigning and writing, including at least six books, focused mostly on racism, discrimination and social policy. Some of his more important pre-therapy writings included White Law: Racism in the Policy, Courts and Prisons (Gordon, 1983) and New Right, New Racism (Gordon & Klug, 1987), and in 1992, along with Yasmin Alibhai Brown, he gave the Annual Lecture for the Race Relations, entitled Race Equality in Europe: Problems and Potential.
His politic