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Douglas Woodhouse died in December 2010, aged ninety. In the following appreciation, I have borrowed material from Christopher Clulow's obituary and reminiscences from former colleagues. Many others will have their own rich store of memories.
Douglas Woodhouse led the Institute of Marital Studies (now the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships) from 1963 until 1980. It was a period of tremendous technical developments in psychoanalytic work with couples, and Douglas's core achievement was to build an organisation that could foster and sustain those creative advances. Founded in 1948 to address the strain on marriages and families following the dislocation of the war years, the then Family Discussion Bureau (FDB) pioneered a new kind of therapy called ‘marital casework’, together with training for a broad range of community practitioners. Douglas was invited to join the unit in 1958 and became its chairman five years later.
Barbara Dearnley remembers him as ‘… an excellent, careful Chairman to a formidable group of highly experienced therapists — mostly women and a large proportion analysts, but they did not faze him’. At first the only one who was not part-time, he assembled what he termed a ‘critical mass’ of full-time staff, trained in-house, who generated a wealth of new insights and published them in monographs, articles, and books. It fully merited the title ‘Institute’, which it took in 1968, ‘… a thinking organisation that integrated