The ISPS has lost one of its great contemporary figures in the peaceful passing of Murray Jackson on Monday July 4th 2011. He was one of the ISPS Honorary Life members, receiving this award at the ISPS Washington conference in 1994.
Murray played a leading role over many decades, in both Britain and Scandinavia, in stimulating and maintaining the interest and skills of many professionals in the contributions that psychoanalytic approaches can make to the understanding, treatment and recovery of individuals with psychotic illnesses.
Born in Australia in 1922, he graduated in medicine at the University of Sydney in 1945. After Military service in occupied Japan and a period of medical research in the United States he moved to London where he was trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. In the hey-day of psychoanalytic influence in psychosomatics he was much influenced by the work of psychoanalysts in the field, in particular that of George Engel and John Romano at the Rochester School of Medicine and of Franz Alexander in Chicago.
Ten years as a Psychiatrist Consultant in a University Hospital led to a life-long interest in the psychological factors contributing to certain physical illnesses, in particular, in those gastro-intestinal disorders which may occasionally reciprocate with psychotic states. Writing about psychosomatics, teaching medical students and trainee psychiatrists, and interest in Jung’s work on psychosis led him to training first in analytical psychology and later in psychoanalysis.
Appointed as Consultant at the Maudsley hospital in 1972, he co-directed with Professor Robert Crawley a 10-bed unit on “Ward 6” where psychoanalytic principles were applied to the treatment of a wide range of the severely mentally ill, whilst continuing his private psychoanalytic practice which focused on people with less severe borderline and psychotic problems. The unit’s success depended on the integration of pharmaceutical, psychological and innovative nursing approaches, together with his psychoanalytically based case discussions involving patients and staff. Particularly important was the active support for the psychological containment offered by the nurses, some of whom became sufficiently inspired to try to change aspects of nursing practise within psychiatry to embody elsewhere the relational and psychoanalytic ideas of Ward 6.
Although far from partisan within the psychoanalytic schools, he felt that Melanie Klein and those who developed her ideas further offered a rich framework that greatly assisted the understanding of the psychotic mind, and he profoundly admired the work of pioneers such as Henry Rey, Donald Meltzer, Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. With the encouragement of Paul Williams, he co-authored the book “Unimaginable Storms: A Search for Meaning in Psychosis” (Jackson & Williams, 1994). This outstandingly educative book was based on edited transcripts of audio-taped interviews of Murray with patients of the ward. It has been a most important international source book for a whole generation of professionals seeking a contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis.
Regrettably the in-patient unit at the Maudsley Hospital was not continued in the same modality after his retirement from the British National Health Service in 1987, but he pursued his teaching at a number of centres in Scandinavia over the next 15 years, recording his experience in a second book – “Weathering the Storms – Psychotherapy For Psychosis” (Jackson, 2001). This was largely born out of this Scandinavian experience and is a masterpiece of communication illustrating how selected psychotic patients can benefit from non-intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy conducted by well-trained professionals.
He was a staunch supporter of ISPS. He and his colleague Michael Conran, around the time of their retirement from the UK public sector persuaded me to attend the ISPS conference in Stockholm in 1991. He had a secret goal – that, having retired, he might interest me in the considerable task of organising an ISPS international conference in the UK for the first time. He hoped such an event would influence practitioners in the mental health field in the UK and to inform them of the importance of developments in other parts of the world. At that time I had little experience of working with psychosis but the wonderful Stockholm ISPS conference changed all that and I was very pleased to work with many colleagues and UK organisations to organise the ISPS symposium in London in 1997.
Murray gave an invigorating plenary speech conveying his enthusiasm and deep understanding of people with psychosis. He participated again in 2006 at the ISPS Madrid conference where he involved his audience in a single case therapy that was carried out over many years. The presentation and discussion lasted the whole afternoon, perhaps something ISPS could usefully do more often.
He wrote an excellent and succinct account of the Kleinian approach to psychosis in the ISPS book “Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Schizophrenic Psychoses” (Alanen et al., 2009), and more recently contributed greatly to a psychobiography of John Nash (Williams, 2010). Paul Williams was a close colleague who played an important part in collaborating with Murray in his writing projects and in publishing his work over the years.
He had to endure lymphatic leukaemia for many years leading to many skin tumours for which the surgery was not straightforward because of the effects of leukaemia on these blood cells. However, he showed great fortitude.
From a personal point of view, he introduced me to the ISPS and became a wonderful source of inspiration as my career changed to being more and more centrally involved with people with psychosis. He supervised some of my work and he and his wife Cynthia became good friends with my family.
Although later he lived in rural France with Cynthia, his constant companion and support over their long marriage, they visited London frequently and we often found a reason to meet up and spend a good part of Sunday mornings keeping one another up to date. Our deepest sympathies go to Cynthia, their three daughters, and their grandchildren.
He remained keenly attuned to the activities of the ISPS throughout, even communicating with us on the day of his death, at the age of 89.
Brian Martindale, Chair-ISPS