Remembering Dana Birksted-Breen

Close colleagues and friends share their personal memories of working with the former Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP, 2007–2022).

The first time I recall meeting Dana was in October 1978 at the Wembley Conference Centre in London. She was in training and just completing her doctoral research at Sussex University. What she had done was to use her observations around the birth of her own first child, her daughter Sasha, to look at the subject more generally. As a book, it was published in 1980, so she must have just finished it.

The meeting was at the third European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) conference ever held. We found ourselves sitting opposite each other at lunch and I think we talked about the main presentations. Jo Sandler had presented a thorough overview on the negative therapeutic reaction and Herbert Rosenfeld had spoken for a long time from the floor, irritated that his ideas had not featured more prominently. We found their differing views interesting and both of value. This kind of shared attitude to assessing controversy rather than taking sides seemed to have orientated us for the next 45 years, including when responding to members of our own middle group, some of whom wanted to turn it into a partisan group!

As we conversed, I remember being immediately impressed with Dana’s thinking. It was to be the first of a long series of discussions and collaborations. She was a highly motivated clinician but someone who recognized the crucial role of theory – be it explicit or implicit, all analysts practice with theory. We remained friends and became colleagues and collaborators in the following years. Always her interest in combining observation and an openness to diverse theory, which had impressed me at the EPF conference, were features of Dana’s approach I admired.

We first worked together formally when I asked her to be the book review editor for the Journal – she had always been a reliable reviewer and