My father, Wolf Blomfield, who has died aged 88, was a Jewish kindertransport refugee who became a psychoanalyst and made a significant contribution to social work.
He was born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Erica, a photographer, and Fritz, who worked for Jewish relief organisations. As a boy of nine, Wolf watched his local synagogue burning on Kristallnacht in 1938. His mother had already fled to Shanghai, and in March 1939 he travelled alone to the UK on a kindertransport train, arriving with a placard around his neck and a small suitcase. He left behind his father, who was deported to Minsk in 1942 and died.
Wolf was placed in a succession of children’s homes, foster homes and hostels. Aged 16, a rabbi gave him a copy of Sigmund Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and its depiction of a hidden layer of unconscious motivations beneath the surface of life was a revelation.
Along with socialist ideals, Freud’s ideas guided Wolf throughout his life. He always said that he wanted to turn the suffering he had experienced into something positive and he saw the new welfare state launched in the postwar years as a vehicle for change. He worked with children who had been in concentration camps and trained in the new discipline of psychiatric social work.
In 1967 Wolf established a unique psychodynamic social work training course at Croydon College, south London, which he directed for three decades. It was intense, emotionally demanding and expressed Wolf’s belief that, if they were to help others, social workers needed to first understand themselves. His view of social work was at odds with the profession’s increasingly managerial tenor, and his Freudian framework clashed with the sociological perspective of most social work training. The course had many admirers and equally vehement critics; but many of its graduates went on to senior social work roles.
In his 40s, Wolf trained to be a Freudian psychoanalyst and for many years he combined his therapeutic and teaching roles, seeing people before and after a working day and all morning on Saturdays. When he retired from teaching, he continued to see patients and train and supervise psychotherapists until the time of his first stroke. His remarkable gift for relating to the emotional truth behind what people were saying made a powerful impression on countless people.
Wolf died from the third in a series of strokes through which his wife, Luci, nursed him. Luci (nee Torrance), whom he married in 1994, survives him, as do the two children, Sarah and me, of his first marriage, to Val (nee Witt), and three grandchildren.
