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Murray Jackson, an eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is a native of Australia who came to London fifty years ago to train in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. He qualified first as an analytical psychologist, and then as a psychoanalyst. His interests took a turn towards psychosis, and he followed John Steiner as the director of the specialist inpatient beds for psychotic patients at the Maudsley until his retirement in 1987. I had the privilege of working on the unit under both of them.
While Dr. Jackson has been personally influential through his direct work, his thinking has remained relatively inaccessible to a larger audience until the 1994 publication of Unimaginable Storms—A Search for Meaning in Psychosis, co-authored with Paul Williams (joint editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis). Since the reader may not be familiar with Jackson's major contributions in the U.K. and Europe to the study of psychosis, I will begin with some of his professional history and theoretical influences.
Jackson approaches clinical material from his personal experience with the contributions of Klein, Bion, the Neo-Kleinians, and especially the work of Henri Rey.1 As part of an integrated research program studying a need-adapted approach to the treatment of psychosis, Jackson went to Scandinavia on invitation to provide supervisory seminars to colleagues who conducted analytic therapy for patients with psychosis. These seminars are the clinical backbone of his second book, Weathering the Storms. Over a 15-year period of visiting 15 hospitals in Scandinavia, some 200 patients