Obituary Notice

Mary was a much valued training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, an astringent supervisor and a writer of many excellent papers and reviews for this and other Journals. She became a member of the Society in (I think) the late 1940s, having had a short analysis with Michael Fordham when they were both working in Nottingham in World War II, and her training analysis was with Dr Culver Barker. She continued working until illness forced her to retire, and her last years were sad ones indeed. Her loss was a great one for her many colleagues and friends.

It was always a feature of Mary's life that she was a twin, and she liked to tell how, although her real name was Jean and her twin's was Kathleen, the midwife who delivered them declared that they already looked like a Mary and a Martha. Mary was deeply interested in clairvoyance and various parapsychological occurrences, so the midwife's perceptiveness appealed to her, perhaps also because she herself could, on occasion, produce categorical opinions. In her analytical work, in groups and in conversation, her psychological understanding was impressively intuitive; she was also a very clear thinker. Her personality combined a sharp mind and a warm heart, once she had made friends with anyone. She generously sponsored a student from Czechoslovakia (as it then was) in 1968, welcomed her into her home for several years and launched her successfully into life. Her garden, in which she delighted to work, gave pleasure to her friends and earned prizes in Hampstead. Her love of cats, her sophisticated appreciation of many art forms as well as of natural beauty, and her wide reading, all contributed to her being a well-rounded person.

Where Mary's life experiences as bases for becoming an analyst are concerned, the story begins with her early childhood in South Africa. Years later she wrote that ‘the glowing faces of the black servants, so different from the shut ones of th