Peter Garth Thomson

Peter Garth Thomson died on July 2, 2001, at the age of eighty. He died at home with his family present, several months after the diagnosis of a brain tumour was made. Despite this illness and the resultant symptoms, Peter continued to retain his interest and enthusiasm for teaching and learning about psychoanalysis until the end of his life.

Peter was one of the founding members of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and he became a training analyst soon after the founding.

In 1970 I became his first candidate analysand. I recall his patient listening as I recounted all the altruistic and ambitious reasons that I wanted to train in psychoanalysis. I knew I had made a good choice of training analyst when, after I paused long enough for him to speak, he gently urged me, “Tell me about yourself as a patient.”

Peter Thomson was born and raised in England and obtained his medical degree in Newcastle at the University of Durham. Although he came to Canada in the late 1940s, he retained much of his English accent, as well as his love of the English Lake District and its favourite son, William Wordsworth. In fact he wrote a paper proposing that the countryside of the Lake District was, for Wordsworth, a transitional object. Peter had two sons, Garth and John, who were born to his marriage to Joy. After Joy died, Peter married Marjorie, with whom he shared a love of art, music, travel, and good wine, and who brought happiness back into his life after his loss. He clearly thought himself greatly fortunate to have won Marjorie's affection.

Peter was the first director of the Forensic Clinic in Toronto. As Eliot Markson remarked in his eulogy, “This was called the sex clinic, and anyone deemed to have an interest in psychoanalysis or psychodynamics was considered an expert.” Peter created an atmosphere of collegiality and inquiry at this setting during his tenure there, and as a result of his experience at this clinic he produced several articles on the sexual deviat