Obituary: Ron Britton

The much respected and loved psychoanalyst Ronald Britton died on 25 August 2025, aged 93. Britton’s erudition and devotion to psychoanalysis remained undiminished right up until his death. He touched the lives of many colleagues, all of whom would have their own personal obituary. His death is a profound professional and personal loss.

Britton was a leading figure in a group of writers and clinicians who extended and explored Klein’s development of Freud’s understanding of the human condition. Roy Schafer called them the “Contemporary Kleinians of London”. They included Hanna Segal, Betty Joseph, Edna O’Shaughnessy, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Irma Brenman Pick, Ruth Reisenberg Malcolm, Michael Feldman, John Steiner, Ignês Sodré and Priscilla Roth. As part of this fertile group, Britton joined an immensely creative period in Kleinian psychoanalysis, but he also had the capacity to maintain his own point of view and not be drawn into mainstream thinking, questioning and exploring underlying assumptions.

Fresh and clear in his thinking, firmly rooted in the everyday clinical situation and steeped in a deep understanding of Freud, Klein and Bion, Britton was also engaged with great literature, poetry, philosophy, theology, linguistics and neuroscience. By making links across these disparate disciplines, he enriched psychoanalysis and opened new avenues of exploration. In a review of Britton’s third book, Between Mind and Brain (2015), Chris Mawson said:

Britton takes psychoanalysis out of its customary and defensively isolated position and shows a startling variety of correspondences with the fundamental thinking taking place in modern science, philosophy, and linguistics. The relationships he clarifies are enlivening … .(Mawson, Review IJP , 98 (6) 1826–1830)

Throughout his working life, Britton was able to stand back, look anew, make compelling and original links.

In the recent past, psychoanalysis has been accused of being unscientific, or even counter-scientific, becaus