Obituary Notice: Faye Pye

Fa Ye Pye died in March of this year of an illness that she bore with much courage. Her death has left a big gap in the world of analytical psychology in Britain. She was one of the early Jungians in this country. Soon after qualifying as a doctor she decided to have an analysis with H. G. Baynes, as she was attracted to Jung's ideas and wanted to train to be an analyst herself. She had to wait till after the war before she could go to Zürich and study there as, at that time, the attraction of Jung himself was very great, and there was no comparable training in London. I met Faye in Zürich. We were in the same group, had the same seminar leaders, and heard the same lectures. She was quiet and reserved, but always friendly, and one could rely on her to ask questions or make some pertinent remarks whenever things got a bit sticky in a seminar.

After finishing her studies in Zürich she became a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology and went back to Durban, then her home, where she started her career as an analyst. She built up a good practice among members of the three main population groups, African, Afrikaner and English-speaking, and wrote a very interesting account of her work which was published in this Journal in 1957 (Vol. 2, No. 2). Eventually, however, life in South Africa became too much of a strain, and she returned to England for good.

Her contributions to analytical psychology were considerable. She was a dynamic chairman of the Analytical Psychology Club; she started the Jung Public Lectures at the Royal Society of Medicine, and she also started the Grass Root Seminars which deal with that aspect of Jung's genius that underlies the purely clinical approach to analysis. Both ventures have become well known, and are now established features of a kind of teaching she had hoped to establish. Faye herself was a good and enjoyable teacher and lecturer, clear, precise, and always speaking with a personal slant from the fund of her experience.

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