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I first met Richard nearly 14 years ago. He and Brian O'Neill, both representing the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS, came to a conference I had organised in Middlesbrough, Teesside, where I managed a small NHS Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Service. Richard came up from London and gave us one of his masterly papers on psychosis.
There are references in the other papers collected here to how Richard thought about psychosis, as well as his humour, kindness and humanity. I would like to add that he had enormous interest in and knowledge of football: that day he and I had a lively discussion about ‘The Boro’, Middlesbrough's football team – which was then doing well in the Premier League. Following on from the conference Richard was enormously supportive and encouraging to me and the other members of our small service and the efforts we were making to establish psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a clinical service and a way of thinking within what was then Teesside's NHS Trust.
My last memory of Richard comes from a half-day conference celebrating the work of Dr Leslie Sohn, which took place at the end of September 2007 and was held in the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Richard was speaking at this event, although clearly experiencing considerable pain after having a facial nerve operation for the re-occurence of his cancer. He was having difficulty moving one side of his face and, as a result, in articulating his words; yet despite all this, he was able to be himself, to be very present and to speak at some length – in a way that I am sure all those of us who were there felt showed his enormous courage and fortitude.
Tony's paper brought to mind thoughts of Richard and his work. Like Tony, I too first came across an example of psychosis when I was in training as a clinical psychologist. My supervisor had asked me to give a memory assessment and other cognitive tests to a middle-aged man who had apparently been complaining of memory problems. I had scarce