William Gillespie ((1905-2001)

With the passing of William Gillespie, the eighth President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (1957-61), on 17 July 2001, not quite a month before his ninety-sixth birthday, the psychoanalytic world lost its major remaining link to the early and mid-twentieth-century era, when organised psychoanalysis was an informal, elite grouping dominated, often oppressively, by the members of the ‘I knew Freud’ club. And it was largely Gillespie's independence of mind, and his courtly but stubborn persistence to bring order and to ‘do the right thing’ that started the transition of the governing bodies of psychoanalysis into the modern democratic scientific and professional organisation that we have today, worthy of the intellectual discipline that it represents to the world.

William was born in post-Boxer Rebellion China in 1905, as the fourth child and only son, of parents who were both passionate missionaries of the Irish Presbyterian Church. He spent six of his first ten years in China—there had been a furlough period back in Ireland between 1908 and 1912—and grew with the conviction that he would expectedly succeed into the missionary life. The family returned to Britain in 1915 and settled in Edinburgh in order to obtain more formal educations for the children, and William lived there until 1930. In 1920, his father, who had returned to missionary work in China, was brutally murdered when confronting household intruders. This precipitated William's turn away from religion and from the God who had failed to preserve his good and faithful servant, and turned him towards a medical career, in which his oldest sister, nine years his senior, was already enrolled.

Although the family's means were now very modest, William was able, on the basis of his outstanding academic record, to obtain scholarships and bursaries and to graduate in medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1929. By that time he had become deeply interested in the writings of psychoanalysis and,