In Memoriam Marie Battle Singer

Marie Singer died in Cambridge, England, in May 1985. She was born in Mississippi. She took her degree at Smith College, Cambridge, Massachusetts and then qualified as a psychiatric social worker. She came to Europe after the War to do social work in Germany and then decided to become a child psychotherapist. She became a student at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in 1950, qualifying in 1954. She was a friend of Karin Stephen and it was in the Bloomsbury group of writers and analysts that she met her husband, the poet and marine biologist James Burns Singer. They moved to Cambridge in 1959 where she made an immediate impact. As the only practising child psychotherapist in Cambridge Marie Singer was greatly in demand, not only as a therapist but also as a teacher. One of her great gifts — and she was also a very gifted therapist — was her ability to bring psychodynamic concepts to interested but uninformed people. She was the first person to lecture to undergraduates in this way in the Psychology course in the Moral Sciences Tripos, and this was in a primarily behaviourally orientated psychology school. She conducted on-going group seminars for doctors in Cambridge which resulted in a number of recruits to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She was made a Fellow of Clare Hall, a distinction in which she took enormous pride and pleasure.

For many years she was a child psychotherapist in the Department of Child Psychiatry at the Middlesex Hospital. Her willingness to accept the most difficult cases and her ready and generous discussion of therapeutic difficulties of other members of staff was invaluable. She reacted to the sudden and premature death of her husband with courage and resilience, and we are left with memories of a vivacious and charismatic personality who made psychodynamic concepts live for a large number of people. She will be remembered with gratitude and affection.