I came to psychoanalysis from an initial training in medicine and psychiatry. Appalled by the conditions for ‘keeping’ patients alive in the old mental hospitals, I quickly turned to the radical alternative of therapeutic communities, promoted by Tom Main, Maxwell Jones, David Clark and many others, including the extravagantly adventurous movement headed by Ronnie Laing and David Cooper. This led me in the 1960s to choose a further training of some psychoanalytic form. There were not many to choose from then. I picked the Kleinian strand at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, largely because they were deeply interested in the more humane psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic people typical of those in mental hospital.
As it happened, the 1960s were soon over, and by the time I qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1976, the general culture had returned to a new conformism. Economic strategies had led to the closure of the old mental hospitals with the development of a new community service which unfortunately inherited the depersonalisation of the ‘insane’ in a new form of neglect. I spent 17 years working in a psychiatric hospital as it ran down and discharged patients ‘to the community’. I was appointed Consultant psychotherapist and I interpreted my role as one to inspire staff towards a human understanding of patients and their own roles, to teach medical students and trainee psychiatrists and to run a local out-patient psychotherapy service.
Besides this I started to write my own material, and having attempted to teach Klein on courses run by psychotherapy organisations, I decided I had to really get down to studying her myself! From that came the work on A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (in 1989, second edition 1991) and Clinical Klein (in 1993) subsequently I have been interested in the specific issue of research in a ‘science of subjectivity’ as I call psychoanalysis; in the unconscious dynamics of groups of people especially in working organisations; in the relevance of psychoanalysis to political thinking if not action as well; and in the history of psychoanalysis.