Obituary Notice

I Met Heinz Westman on only one occasion when, in August, 1986, I went to his home in Readfield, Maine, a meeting I had been looking forward to as he had been a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology for so many years.

What I know of him and can say about him comes from that brief meeting, from his writings and from early minutes of our Society. He became a member in July, 1946, and was thus one of the very first members of the Society. He was also present at an Extraordinary General Meeting held at 32 Carlton Hill in December, 1946, to discuss the opening of the C. G. Jung Clinic; he was elected to the Council and soon afterwards became Treasurer of the Society. He continued as Treasurer until 1955 when he accepted an appointment at the Roosevelt Hospital, New York. By this time the Society's finances had been showing a healthy balance for some years.

Though I wanted to draw attention to his early involvement with the Society, Heinz Westman himself would wish to be remembered for one of his main endeavours while he was in England, namely, his founding in 1945 of a series of annual conferences called ‘The Present Question Conference’, which, so I understand from Michael Fordham, were modelled on the Eranos meetings held at Ascona in Switzerland. Each year eminent people from different disciplines were invited to address a particular problem, the central idea being that it was not so much the subject matter as the process of communication between specialisms that was important.

On the occasion of the First International Congress of the I. A. A. P. in Zürich in 1958 Time magazine published an article on analytical psychology and featured a photograph of a vigorous-looking Heinz Westman with Jung, who was then aged eighty-three.

In 1961 The Springs of Creativity was published, a book in which Westman set out what he considered to be the fundamental steps in the development of the psyche, and discussed the book of Genesis as an ‘astonishingly accurate p