Nina Cohen 1934-2017

Nina Cohen, a past member of what is now called Tavistock Relationships, died unexpectedly of a brain aneurism on November 11th, 2017. In 1976, she joined what was then called the Institute of Marital Studies, undertaking a three-year registrarship before joining the staff in 1979. She quickly established herself at the clinical core of the unit, eventually coordinating its clinical services and orchestrating meetings with referrers. Her work with referrers is evidenced in a paper that she jointly contributed to a medical journal considering how marital problems surface in general practice (Pugh & Cohen, 1984). In this paper, a distinction was drawn between patients who overtly recognised that their symptoms were connected with unhappy relationships, but were frightened about seeking help because of separation anxiety, and those covert presenters (whom they called “jectors”) whose anxiety was evident, but displaced and unfocused. Later in her time as co-ordinator of clinical services, and with the advent of computer technology, Nina took the lead in developing a database that allowed the Institute to draw a profile of couples using its services. The value of this was apparent in the paper she co-authored in 1993, identifying predictive factors in the take-up of couple psychotherapy (Clulow et al., 1993). From her arrival until her retirement in 1994, she contributed