In Memoriam Clifford Scott, 1903-97

Dr. Clifford Scott waved the world a final goodbye on January 19, 1997 Born in Ontario nearly ninety-four years ago, he went on to achieve international eminence in the field of mental health. By virtue of some sixty years of clinical experience and his close personal relationships with many of the leading psychiatrists and analysts of this century, Scott is a piece of psychiatric and psychoanalytic history He numbered among the pioneering few who started to analyse schizophrenic and manic-depressive patients on a regular basis Most recently the British Psychoanalytic Society made him an honorary member, a rare distinction that has engraved him in its legendary chronicle.

Scott has further historical distinctiveness I know of no one, from Freud to Winnicott and up to the present day, who has left a peerless record of having treated so many different kinds of fascinating and sometimes strange patients And tenant within that overall unique record are some individual cases that themselves stand unique within the annals of psychoanalytic treatment. That record bears testimony to Scott's “longsitting” wakeful attention to strange clinical phenomena. He observed them, analysed them, and had enough wonder left over to write them up, mapping a mindscape now worthy to be named Scotsland.

Scott acquired his M D at the University of Toronto in 1927. Thereupon he trained in the Manhattan State Hospital and in the Henry Phipps Clinic, where he studied under Paul Schilder, as well as Adolf Meyer, the most influential North American psychiatrist in the first half of our century Then Scott worked in the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, and in 1931 left for England He became Melanie Klern's first candidate in analysis, which lasted from 1931 to 1933. He had supervision with Klein herself, with Ernest Jones, and with Ella Sharpe, and earned membership in the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1933. Later on, Scott analysed Winnicott for one session and both of Winnicott's wives for a numbe