Obituary Notice: Vera Cole

IN the quiet and understated manner that was Vera's way, she touched and enriched the lives, professionally as well as personally, both of myself and of my colleagues who worked with her in the field of child psychiatry.

I first met Vera some twenty-one years ago when I came to the Child Guidance Clinic in Harrow, where she was working as a child psychotherapist. Over the years that I was there, I and my colleagues came to recognize that this slim, almost fragile looking woman, encompassed many roles for us-she was ‘Mediatrix’, ‘Mentor’, ‘Surrogate mother’, and ‘Arbitrator’ in the affairs of the clinic.

She was a stabilizing influence on us all, ready, perhaps all too ready-and we to our shame took advantage of her willingness-to listen to the gripes and internecine quarrels that are one of the inevitable by-products of any intense group situation. Vera was rarely partisan, but had that rare and enviable gift of making one feel special and important. In the words of one of the clinic team ‘Vera always made me feel that she was on my side’. We tended to-take her for granted such was her uncomplaining, quietly available presence.

In keeping with her character, Vera was never one of the ‘high profile’ members of our profession, despite the fact that she may have been one of the first, if not the first, non-medical Jungian child psychotherapists in this country, having already earlier qualified as an adult analyst.

As one of the early group interested in applying analytical ideas in the treatment of children, she contributed to these developments in the quiet manner that was so much a function of her personality. She also at one stage represented the Society at the Association of Child Psychotherapists.

She touched my life particularly, and the life of the clinic in so many ways. It was Vera, and in particular the kind of person she was, who made me decide to embark on my own training as a Jungian analyst-not because of any intriguing theoretical knowledge or model she propo