Obituary for Edna O'Shaughnessy

Edna O’Shaughnessy, who has died aged 97, was a leading British psychoanalyst of both children and adults. Her papers are amongst the finest psychoanalytic writing. They have a rare combination of incisive clarity, imaginativeness and a great sensitivity to her patients’ deepest anxieties.

Tall, red-haired (known to all as “Red”), beautiful into old age and dignified in her bearing, O’Shaughnessy worked with patients and supervisees into her 90s. She was much loved and respected across the different theoretical groupings of the British Society. She worked in the tradition of Melanie Klein, a pioneer of child analysis who had added to Freud’s picture of the mind new discoveries about the earliest stages of psychic development.

O’Shaughnessy initially trained as a child psychotherapist, at the Tavistock Clinic, London, and retained a particular interest in children’s inner worlds. After the Tavistock, she trained as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. She later became a training and supervising analyst, and a Distinguished Fellow, of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Her work is unified not so much by its subject matter, which is very diverse, but by her underlying preoccupations. These include the nature of psychic reality, of psychosis and of subjectivity.

Edna O’Shaughnessy was born Edna Rutovitz in 1924 in South Africa. Her parents’ families, both Jewish, had emigrated from Eastern Europe to escape the pogroms. The family of her father, Philip, whose own father was a rabbi, had come from Lithuania, while the family of her mother, Minnie, was from Bolton in England, having moved from Minsk in the late nineteenth century before moving again to South Africa in the early years of the twentieth. The family settled in Johannesburg, where her father owned a soap factory. Edna was the older of two children: her brother was born when she was 4. She excelled academically at school.

O’Shaughnessy had early contact with psychoanalysis: her father, who