My friend Kirsty Hall, who has died of cancer aged 67, was for years a well-known figure in London’s psychoanalytic community, practising as an analyst, teaching at Middlesex University, the Guild of Psychotherapists and the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and writing several books, as well as founding her own publishing company, Rebus Press.
She was a powerful figure, with a fierce determination when she was set on a course of action, shaking up an often cautious and moribund profession. At the same time, she was a patient and committed teacher and supervisor, a generous colleague, and a dynamic organiser whose initiatives bore vigorous fruit.
Kirsty was born in Sunderland, daughter of Walter and Elizabeth Allan. Her father owned a small shipping line. Educated at Queen Ethelburga’s school, Harrogate, Kirsty seemed destined for a traditional life but fought against what she saw as the confines of a stultifying middle-class femininity.
She began her professional life as a careers counsellor, but in the early 1990s, having moved to London, trained as a psychoanalyst at the Arbours Association in Tottenham. She was powerfully influenced by second wave feminism and spent much of her professional life kicking against the misogyny, supported by ill-constructed theory, that still disfigures much of psychoanalysis.
Studying (in the 1990s) and later teaching (from 2001 to 2006) on the psychoanalysis MA at Middlesex University led by Bernard Burgoyne, Kirsty read and absorbed much of what was most innovative in psychoanalytic thought coming from France, and Europe more generally. She endeavoured to keep psychoanalysis open to currents in contemporary philosophy and social thought, making path-breaking texts available through Rebus Press, which she set up in the 1990s. Latterly she worked with Oliver Rathbone at Karnac Books, where she edited (and wrote one of) a series of short books.
She joined the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis soon after it was set up in 1998 and proved a fount of energy and dynamism, teaching, serving as treasurer, and being the mainspring behind a new journal, Sitegeist. Not satisfied with this, in 2007 she published The Stuff of Dreams, a text that combines exegesis of Freud, Lacan, and others, with case histories and cultural comment.
Kirsty was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012 and was pugnacious and indomitable to the end.
She was devoted to her husband, Chris Hall, whom she married in 1979, and their two sons, Duncan and Martin. All of them survive her.
