Obituary: Giles Clark

Over the course of a 40-year career as a Jungian analyst, Giles Clark became an influential figure in both England and Australia, where he emigrated in 1995. He took a key role in the development of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts (ANZSJA) and was widely appreciated for his fiercely independent mind and profound clinical understanding of deeply disturbed borderline personalities, expressed in a series of highly influential clinical papers, three of which were published in this Journal (1995, 1996 and 2006). He died in March 2019 at the age of 71.

Giles Clark was born in Mayfair and grew up in rural Essex. His father had been a senior figure in the RAF who was involved in planning the D-day landings; he later became an insurance underwriter for Lloyds, having established their aviation reinsurance division. After Sherborne school, Giles spent a year in India before three years at Cambridge University studying anthropology. He then worked at Christie's auction house and studied art history at the Courtauld Institute. He maintained a life-long interest in art and antiquarian books and, perhaps due to his father's influence, also knew a great deal about British wartime bombers and classic sports cars.

He began his analytic training in Zurich around 1971 and joined the newly formed International Association of Jungian Trainees and Recently Qualified Analysts in 1974. Through this, he met another young and like-minded newly qualified analyst from London, Andrew Samuels. It is not difficult to see why the two of them became life-long friends: both of them young, intellectually curious and iconoclastic, and keen to find their own path through the tangled conflicts of the Jungian world in which they found themselves at the time.

Giles qualified and returned to London in 1976 (aged 28) at just the point when Gerhard Adler was breaking away from the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in order to form the Association of Jungian Analysts (AJA). This a