Robert Frederick Hobson

18 May 1920 - 13 November 1999

This is a personal note about a very old friend, Bob Hobson, who died on 13 November 1999. We were part of a little group in some of the earliest training in the SAP - demobilized from the Services after the Second World War and learning psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. Bob did not take to orthodoxies and resisted anything that seemed like a claim that analytical psychology was the only true faith, but he was deeply influenced by meeting Jung. He was much involved in the development of thought and practice in the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP), teaching and supervising, as well as running the Society. He was Chairman at a time of upheaval in relations within the Society and dealt with the problem with firmness.

From those early days at the Maudsley I recall an exchange between Bob and a rather intimidating professor. At a meeting in which Bob had described psychotherapy with a patient the professor challenged him: ‘It seems to me, Dr Hobson, that you and the patient were doing something like making a poem!’ Bob responded vigorously, ‘Yes!’ (The professor went on to appoint Bob as a very young Consultant at the Bethlem Royal Hospital.) I think Bob's style then adumbrated the ‘Conversational Model’ of psychotherapy which he later developed and taught at Manchester University and described in his book Forms of Feeling; the Head of Psychotherapy; it is used extensively in Britain and abroad.

In 1974 Bob surprised us by returning to practise and teach in the place where he had been at Medical School after Cambridge. He was appointed Reader in Psychotherapy at the University of Manchester (1974-85). Much of his heart was always in the Northwest English counties; he had grown up in a Lancashire mill town and he and Marjorie, his wife, lived after their return to the North on the edge of the grand Pennine Hills country near Manchester. It suited him. He had a down-to-earth personality and a warm way of making people he met, from all w