Obituary: Ignês Sodré (1945–2025)

Ignês Sodré, who died in May 2025, was a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a committed clinician, a generous, inspiring teacher and a prolific and influential writer, passionate about literature and psychoanalysis. Her published contributions make her one of the most creative and original thinkers within the contemporary Kleinian psychoanalytic tradition. Priscilla Roth, the editor of her book Imaginary Existences: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Phantasy, Fiction, Dreams and Daydreams , describes Ignês, in her introduction, as a “brave and independent thinker”, steeped in Freud’s and Klein’s thinking, but with her own distinctive voice, which has a “mixture of confidence and intimacy, even playfulness”.

She is probably best known for her interest in literature and psychoanalysis, and the cross fertilisation between the two, which she wrote extensively about, but she also made several important contributions to the theoretical understanding of many clinical phenomena, like obsessional neurosis, depression and identification.

At the end of Middlemarch, author George Eliot (a writer Ignês was particularly fond of) sums up the life of her heroine, Dorothea, and notes that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive”. What Eliot means here is that it is impossible to sum up the value of a life and the impact the life of one person has on the lives of other people. This is of course, universally true: every life is incalculably diffusive and cannot be fully described and summed up.

This is also true when one attempts any kind of convincing description, like in this obituary, of a psychoanalyst’s impact on the lives of people she came in contact with and on our discipline.

The personal and the professional diffuse into one another. The word diffusive has a particular resonance when thinking of Ignês Sodré and her impact on psychoanalysis. It describes well how her ideas have influenced the thinking of many analysts, espe