Coline Covington—An Appreciation

Dr Coline Covington, a long supporter of, and regular plenary speaker at, IAFP conferences, died on 17 July 2023 in London, UK, where she had lived for the past forty-five years. She was diagnosed with an inoperable glioblastoma in April 2023 and, as she had hoped, died thankfully without serious pain and with no loss of her always acute mental faculties.

After studying political theory at Princeton University and subsequently at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University, she gained a PhD from the London School of Economics with her thesis on juvenile crime. In 1975 she helped set up the first victim-offender mediation project in the UK with the Metropolitan police. She was a highly accomplished Jungian analyst and a former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and the author of numerous books and articles on political/social psychology.

Just after the terrible events of 9/11, Coline suggested to our mutual friend and colleague, Paul Williams, that they should bring together a collection of psychoanalytic papers on war and terrorism. Her initiative led to the publication by Karnac in 2002 of Terrorism and War: Unconscious Dynamics of Political Violence. This was a typical response by Coline. Human hurt provoked in her an immediate wish to respond, but that response always involved psychological reflection, collaboration with colleagues, and then usually a practical intervention.

I already knew Coline, because she had been representing The British Confederation of Psychotherapists on a group of advisors that I had brought together at Westminster earlier in 2001 to help me develop a statutory registration scheme for psychotherapists. In our meetings I was impressed by this thoughtful, gracious colleague who cared about the development of our profession and the well-being of those who came to us for help.

However, she also shared my concerns about political violence and my wish to find psychological ways of addressing it, so when VamIk Volkan, Robi Friedma