Obituary Notices

Early in the century John Layard went to consult Homer Lane because of a hysterical paralysis, and he was fond of telling how in a few interviews he was cured, was soon driving a motor car and helping in the treatment of at least one of Lane's patients. Thus he was in at the very start of psychotherapy in Great Britain, and the influence of Lane persisted throughout Layard's life.

Psychotherapy was not, however, to be his first love. At Cambridge he studied anthropology and came under the influence of Rivers, with whom he went to the New Hebrides where he collected a vast amount of material. The stone men of Melekula, a monumental and standard volume, contained only a small part of his findings, the rest of which was never sufficiently organized for publication.

Layard's difficulty in writing this book led him into analysis with H. G. Baynes and from then on his main interest became analytical psychology, although during the war he was attached to the department of anthropology at Oxford. There he had started his practice in the 1930s and also founded the Psychology and Religion Society. This had considerable, though transitory, influence—its activities ending when Layard decided to go out to Zürich where he was analysed by Jung. Layard had observed that Jung's fourfold map of the psyche showed striking parallels with the structure of the kinship systems in Malekula, both matriarchal and patriarchal, and his aim was to show that these systems and other features of the society that he studied were reflections of psychic reality. This work was never completed, but some of it, particularly his theory of incest, was adopted by Jung without alteration in ‘The psychology of the transference’.

After leaving Zürich Layard returned to England and practised until his death, first in London and then in Cornwall. His stimulating and sometimes shock-like influence was felt in the London Society for a short period. Members attempted to assimilate Layard and his ideas. In