Obituaries

(18 May 1920-17 March 2001)

A personal tribute

Excellent and full obituaries, paying testament to Anthony's life, have been published both here and in the States since his sudden death on March 17th so, rather than repeating those, this is a personal tribute.

Anthony was still actively writing and lecturing up to the moment of his death; he was taken ill whilst giving an after dinner speech at Wadham College just prior to the Oxford Psychotherapy Society conference at which he was due to give a lecture. The last time I saw him, just before his 80th birthday, he seemed aware that he might not have much time left and, with great regret, turned down an invitation to lecture at an SAP Oxford seminar, explaining that he wanted to finish the book he was writing before, as he put it, ‘I fall off my perch’. I hope he managed to do so.

I first met Anthony when he was appointed as the first consultant psychotherapist at the Warneford hospital in 1974, at the same time as I started my training as a psychiatric registrar there. I remember one summer's afternoon, sitting on a bench in the hospital grounds with him for supervision of my first psychotherapy patient and realizing that his attitude to patients was quite different from that of any other psychiatrist I had yet encountered in my training. He understood patients from the inside and his view that ‘it is not psychopathology that counts, it's what you do with it’, permeated the whole of his work as a supervisor. In the professional environment of a psychiatric hospital where speed of treatment was of the essence and behavioural change was the main measure of therapeutic efficacy, Anthony taught me to be patient, to recognize that the inner world changes very slowly. Above all, he knew about the creative struggle that lies beneath mental illness and the value of those unconscious processes. Although he was no longer a member of the Society of Analytical Psychology when I met him, without doubt it was he who started