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John grew up in Manchester. His father was an engineer, an entrepreneurial man who was something of an inventor: the family had dimmer switches decades before they became commonplace. John, himself, enjoyed a varied early education. From Manchester Grammar School he went on to Art School but, after National Service, he decided to train as a veterinary surgeon. However, his fascination with human behaviour led him to switch to human medicine and he worked as a GP and then qualified in psychiatry in Edinburgh, where he met his wife Joyce. In his psychiatric training he was strongly influenced by Professor Frank Fish (who warned him humorously about the dangers of enthusiasm) and he became interested in the ideas of the movement for therapeutic communities, ideas which he put into practice in Croydon.
He moved to the Surrey outskirts of London in the sixties and, from this time, John and Joyce remained in the area, bringing up their two children, Bruce and Sheena, and devoting themselves to the welfare of the community: Joyce as a GP and John first as a psychiatrist and later as an analyst.
He trained with the SAP (Society of Analytical Psychology) in London, and his analyst was Michael Fordham. He was appreciative of the supervision of Kenneth Lambert, who valued John's artistic talent and recognized the image- making capacity as uniquely useful in analytic work.
For the rest of his working life, with patience and humour, he offered his knowledge and his intuition to people wishing to understand and value the human mind in all its facets. He worked with clergy and trainee counsellors and continuously with patients. Sadly he wrote very little about his work, but this is in keeping with his style: he believed in the overriding importance of immediate human experience as the true agent of change. It was what he did and not what he said that mattered. He admired and respected Sufi wisdom, and by the definition of Robert Graves (i