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Isabel Menzies-Lyth (IML) was born in 1917 in Dysart, a small town on the East Coast of Scotland. She went to a local school from 1921 to 1933, then to Madras College in St Andrews, a state grammar school. In 1935 she went to St Andrews University and in 1939 graduated from St Andrews with first class honours in economics and experimental psychology. From 1939 to 1945 she was a lecturer in economics in St Andrews and in 1945 she joined the Civil Resettlement Headquarters of the British Army. In 1946 she joined the staff of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and stayed there until 1975, when she married Oliver Lyth and came to live in Oxford.
In 1954 she qualified in psychoanalysis and in 1957 qualified as a child analyst; she became a training analyst at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1960.
After 1975 she continued some work with the Tavistock and built up a private psychoanalytic practice and a consultancy practice in Oxford. She is still doing a small amount of practice in Oxford.
Some of her papers have been translated into several languages and her two volumes of collected essays (Menzies-Lyth, 1988, 1989) have been hugely influential in the field of organisational consultancy and in the theory of institutional dynamics.
I interviewed IML in August last year. The interview lasted five to six hours. These passed quickly and it was only after we ran out of tapes that we noticed how tired we both were. We again met a couple of times some months later, to work on the final version of the interview. Somewhat to my disappointment, Isabel, rather than the editors, decided to cut out a considerable amount of material which I mistakenly thought was interesting. Apart from that, I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and I think that Isabel did, too. I learned a great