My brother, Richard Rusbridger, who has died aged 75 from brain cancer, was a leading British psychoanalyst in the tradition of Melanie Klein. He taught, wrote and lectured, in the UK and abroad, as well as training many future analysts. But it was his clinical work over the course of 40 years or more that gave him the greatest satisfaction.
Richard started formal training as what was sometimes called a “post-Kleinian” in the late 1980s. His training analyst was Elizabeth Spillius, who had also been an anthropologist and who was herself one of the foremost Klein scholars. (Richard was later to co-edit her papers.)
Once established in private practice, he saw patients in his north London home. When his death was announced, several of his patients took to social media to say what a profound effect their time with him had had. One wrote: “He completely changed my life, my relationship with myself and with my family.” Another said: “Richard was my life witness. It’s a sad and scary world without him in his chair behind my head, occasionally saying ‘quite’.”
Richard was born in Lusaka, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, where our father, GH Rusbridger, was deputy director of education and our mother, Barbara (nee Wickham), was a nurse.
Our parents returned to the UK from Africa; they had no permanent home here, and another brother, Guy, who had been born with severe disabilities, needed intensive nursing care. So when Richard was only eight, he was packed off to board at a prep school in Taunton in Somerset.
Once the family was settled, in Guildford, Surrey, and after Guy’s death, Richard returned to live at home. He was a chorister at Guildford Cathedral under the redoubtable Barry Rose, and sang at the building’s consecration in 1961.
He progressed to become a music scholar at Cranleigh. One of Richard’s near contemporaries, James Harpur, wrote a fine volume of poems about the school they both knew, which included the stanza: “Each night I prayed / for protection / from arrest and sadism / each day believing in / my random luck.” They were lines that would have spoken to Richard.
At Magdalene College, Cambridge, he struggled to choose between his two loves, music and literature. One close friend at the time recalled: “He did incredibly little work, but he was fascinated by other people and the contrast between what we pretend to be and what we are.”
After a brief period of teaching he began his long immersion in the world of professionally helping others: as a social worker, as a child psychotherapist and then a child analyst and training analyst. He was, his colleagues said, a skilled clinician, with a combination of sharp clinical perception and sympathetic humanity. He was also a popular supervisor, an inspiring trainer of future analysts, and was appointed honorary reader at University College London.
His interest in music and literature surfaced in a number of papers exploring artistic works through the lens of psychoanalysis, including studies of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, on narcissism in King Lear, and comparing Shakepeare’s Othello and Verdi’s Otello.
In 1982, he married Gill Philpott, a psychotherapist; they had two children, Charlie and Alice. They all survive him.
