Thinking with Billy

Without Simon the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at UWE, Bristol, would never have got off the ground. He brought an energy and single-mindedness that made things happen. Coming to university life comparatively late, he found our traditional academic disciplinary boundaries bizarre. The issues that disturbed him, particularly the lived experiences of race and class, couldn’t be compartmentalised in this way. Psycho-social studies transcended such boundaries and it was a place where he and I felt at home.

He drew deeply upon psychoanalytic theory, particularly Klein’s way of thinking about our inner conflicts, but found himself resistant to engaging with its practice, even when things started getting tough for him. But he enjoyed the company of practitioners, particularly those who were also able to think and write. Hence, I think, the enjoyment he got from working with Lynne Layton, his co-editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and also from some of the Belgian Lacanians, such as Freddy Declercq, who became drinking companions during the annual conferences of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society at Rutgers.

In Bristol Simon obtained a similar kind of pleasure from working with Herb Hahn, a very senior but rather maverick psychoanalytic psychotherapist who became one of the first Visiting Fellows at the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. In 2005 Herb, Simon and I ran a series of workshops hosted

by Witwatersrand University in South Africa. We had a lovely week together. I think Herb knew, in a way that I didn’t at that time, that Simon was troubled. But he also loved this bright, spikey and imaginative man, and Simon in turn loved taking the piss out of Herb’s eccentricities. By the end of that decade, after a series of personal crises, inexplicable accidents and mounting health problems, Simon was withdrawing into his cottage in the Cornish village of Polruan, whilst Herb found late new love in Melbourne. I heard less and less from