Eric Brenman obituary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/01/eric-brenman

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Eric Brenman, who has died aged 92, was an independent-minded Kleinian psychoanalyst. He helped bring psychoanalytic technique more closely in touch with the experience of the patient, and several of his influential papers were collected as Recovery of the Lost Good Object (2006). With his second wife, Irma Brenman Pick, he taught widely on the continent – he was especially influential for a generation of analysts from Italy and Sweden – and beyond.

Eric emphasised the futility of interpretation of pathology without the patient sensing that the analyst was treating him in a non-judgmental way. He maintained that any meaningful insight is possible only in the context of a relationship. Many patients have lost their "good object".

We all need a safe enough place for our feelings. As a young army doctor during the second world war, Eric was sent from Gibraltar, en route to Burma, to an up-country area in Ghana (then the Gold Coast), to deal with an outbreak of meningitis. He was confronted with a man in a wild state, accused of a serious crime. The chief of the man's tribe observed: "That poor fellow has no home for his feelings." Eric was struck by this – and by the fact that when he got back to Accra the ship had left and he was spared Burma.

Following one of his mentors, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, Eric underlined the need to tolerate and allow experience, while fully appreciating how terrifying this can be. A young person has to fall in love, have the extreme experience of idealisation, live with it and not deny or repudiate it; and then modify it over time through the relationship with the partner and with reality. He liked to joke that it would be mad if a proposal of marriage began: "I know I overvalue you as a love object, but …"

Every choice in life, including of course the failure to choose, involves loss. Like the patient, the analyst has to struggle to reach a frame of mind in which he can accept imperfection, and know about his own failings. Sometimes the patient gets a sense of this struggle. "You can't be an analyst unless you're also a patient," he said.

Eric argued that the analyst should try to avoid presenting himself as perfect. The "perfect" analyst is not only false, but also risks reinforcing a false self in the patient. He stressed the importance of being oneself with the patient, thereby helping the patient to become him or herself.

He recalled a senior colleague in his early days of working in a psychiatric hospital saying: "To have a bad mother is a terrible thing. To have no mother is a terrible thing" – pause – "To have a good mother is a terrible thing." A good mother faces the child/patient with their own feelings of inadequacy and envy; an over-protective one hinders them from facing reality and encourages compliance.

Psychoanalysis has over time needed to move from an ideal of cold scientific objectivity to acceptance of the potential for learning from strongly felt responses to what the patient brings. A charming and deep-thinking man, Eric was aware of the tragic dimensions of life and its inevitable struggles and compromises.

Born in London to a Jewish family that came originally from Odessa, Eric grew up in Highbury, north London, and trained at St Bartholomew's hospital medical school. After qualifying as a doctor, he joined the army, and was on the ships for the D-day landings. After the war, he worked first at the postgraduate hospital in Hammersmith, west London, then at Napsbury, Hertfordshire. From 1950 to 1955, he was a senior registrar at the Tavistock Clinic under its director, Jock Sutherland. He qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1954, and from the following year worked full-time in private practice.

Eric was analysed by Hanna Segal. Early in his analysis she made an interpretation that struck a deep chord with him; that he longed for a place where he could be depressed in peace. She knew how he felt and managed to convey to him that how he felt was important. He said: "Someone else might say something similar and you'd feel insulted. You could feel her humanity."

Being sane involves being able to deal with, accept, one's madness, one's vanity, and one's excesses. Eric loved Greek tragedy, regarding The Bacchae as one of the greatest plays. People who think they are pure have cut out important aspects of their lives. Eric recognised that no one can be absolutely sane, without any diversions from the truth. He was interested in the way narrow-mindedness and cruelty go back and forth between those claiming to be pure (the fundamentalists) and those on the side of "anything goes".

As president of the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London from 1987 to 1990, Eric worked to break down the then tribal passions between the groups representing different theoretical and clinical orientations within British psychoanalysis; together with his colleague and his successor as president, Anne-Marie Sandler, he set up a seminar to think, in a congenial atmosphere, about group differences and similarities. As in analysis, if people get together, can acknowledge their own faults and be able to come to value each other's strengths, these damaging splits may be modified. Eric was one of those who helped make these divisions less absolute. The process continues.

Eric is survived by two sons, Owen and Greg, from his first marriage, to the painter Ishbel McWhirter, which ended in divorce; by Irma; and by his stepson, Daniel Pick.

• Eric Brenman, psychoanalyst, born 12 January 1920; died 6 March 2012