The Work of Clifford Yorke

Clifford York was one of the leading Freudians of his generation. As Anna Freud's close colleague, he was also one of the last remaining links to the theoretical and clinical tradition set by her father, Sigmund Freud. Clifford Yorke was a prolific writer and played a very active role in the scientific life of both the British Society of Psychoanalysis and the Anna Freud Centre. The Anna Freud Centre was the foremost international centre for training to work psychoanalytically with children in the Freudian tradition. Clifford Yorke belonged to the tradition not just by training but by temperament. To be a psychoanalyst, as Freud saw it, required more than a knowledge of science. Unless the psychoanalyst is at home with literature, the arts and mythology, for example, he or she will not be able to make sense of much that patients bring to their analyses. He was a leading psychoanalyst and close associate of Anna Freud. I would like to comment mostly on three aspects of his work: his knowledge and use of Anna Freud's Diagnostic profile, his work with alcoholics and drug addicts, and his use of metapsychology.

For many years, as medical director, he chaired the Tuesday afternoon diagnostic meetings at the Anna Freud Centre. For most of the time, he listened patiently to the diagnostic profile some of us presented and occasionally he would also. One of them, particularly, comes to my mind as an excellent example of the clinical advantages of the profile, a servant to the diagnostician, never a master, as he used to remind us constantly. By this he meant the profile was a way of thinking, rather than a compendium of headings and concepts, a metapsychological and sophisticated way of reflecting psychoanalytically about patients of all ages, a guide to a