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Richard Lucas died on Monday 28th July 2008 at the age of 65 years. He worked as a Consultant Psychiatrist serving the areas of Tottenham and Edmonton in North London and he was in addition a practicing psychoanalyst. This unique combination of skills and thinking combined with his humour, warmth, energy and iconoclasm has had a major impact on generations of trainees, his patients and his colleagues.
His life-long interest in applying psychoanalytic thinking to psychotic states informed his vigorous endeavours in adapting and bringing together the psychoanalytic approach with a psychiatric practice and he made a unique contribution in bringing psychoanalysis and psychiatry closer together. This was a courageous undertaking which on many occasions especially in the early years generated ambivalence from both psychiatrists and psychoanalysts by him constantly challenging the ‘purity’ of the medical model and the pure gold standard of psychoanalysis.
He was a founding member of the General Psychiatric Session of the Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and its Chair for many years and chair of the British Psychoanalytical Society NHS Liaison Committee. He was also a member of council of the APP and a member of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Psychotherapy at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Richard was born in Leeds and always kept an affinity to his roots and remained a life-long supporter of Leeds United Football Club. He was very much a Yorkshire man; he could be blunt, he certainly said what he thought and in that respect very much had his feet on the ground. He made a powerful and colourful presence in the committees he was involved in with the passionate expression of his views, which could evoke either love or hate in his colleagues. Such was his warmth and humour that even people in complete disagreement with him could not fail to like him. Richard's father was a dentist and died of ill-health when Richard was only 10 months old. His mother w