Obituary for Irma Brennan Pick

Irma Brennan Pick, the widely respected British psychoanalyst, has died at the age of 89. Originally from South Africa, she travelled to the UK in 1955, aged 21, with her new husband to begin his training as a psychoanalyst in London. Irma herself first entered the training in child psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London, later going on to do the analytic training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis herself. These were years of consolidation of the three psychoanalytic traditions that were to co-exist within the British Society under the Gentlemen’s Agreement that settled the Controversial Discussions - today’s Kleinians, Contemporary Freudians and Independents (King and Steiner 1991). Outside the Society, the Hampstead Clinic was the professional hub of Anna Freud, from which important clarifications of the Freudian position were to flow. The Children’s Department of the Tavistock Clinic, which would eventually move literally into the next street, was heavily Kleinian in orientation and a hive of clinical and theoretical creativity. Irma Pick thrived in this atmosphere. In her two trainings she was taught and supervised by some of the leading figures in Kleinian psychoanalysis at the time, including Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, Esther Bick, Herbert Rosenfeld and Wilfred Bion. Her analyst was Hans Thorner.

Irma Lief was born in Arcadia, a suburb of Pretoria, South Africa, on 13 April 1934, the daughter of Min (née Jacobs) and Joe, both emigrants from Latvia who had arrived in South Africa around the turn of the twentieth century. The couple married towards the end of the First World War, and Irma had two older siblings, a sister and a brother; two of her maternal aunts also lived with the family. Her father, who died when she was 13, was a chronic asthmatic. He struggled in business but her mother set up a successful secretarial college in the heart of Pretoria. Although their painful history, as exiles from the Baltic region, was so recent, her parents said li