Unpicking

Andrew tells me that we first met when he came to be interviewed for a job at The Women’s Therapy Centre in 1976. Those were heady days when political activists had the capacity to challenge conventional institutions and bodies of knowledge and set up alternative sites of excellence to explore social and scientific issues from a different basis. Within psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counseling and psychiatry, new ideas about the mad and the sad were proposed. The asylums were closed and psychotherapy was being appropriated for its progressive potential. For a brief period radical therapy flourished in Latin America, in North America and in various European countries. Always situating the individual in their social class, gender, age, sexual identity and ethnic contexts, it insisted that psychoanalytic and psychological knowledge was insufficient if it failed to locate the particulars of each individual or each group’s experience. People could not be extracted from their history as it was constitutive of self, and that history included the psychological and social trajectories. Reformulating psychoanalysis for the 1968 generation became a quest for which Andrew, with his wide intellectual curiosities, was admirably suited. Andrew once told me he became a Jungian analyst somewhat by accident in that the Jungians were the only group who would interview such a young person with a background in theatre and politics. He had not been a long-standing student of Jung’s writings but came across a book on the social meaning of Jung’s psychology. It was a felicitous meeting which allowed him to develop and rewrite much of the Jungian canon for a new generation.