Tribute by Michael Brearley at Arthur Hyatt Williams' memorial service at the Tavistock Clinic:
I met Hyatt in the early 1980s, when he was the supervisor or consultant to the Camden Psychotherapy Unit – I always knew him and think of him as ‘Hyatt’ rather than ‘Arthur’. He was a pioneer in treating criminals psychoanalytically. He was a warm, open, eager, energetic and optimistic person. He was both boyish and paternal.
He believed strongly that criminals, including murderers for whom in the nature of things no direct reparation was possible, could be helped to work on their sense of guilt and modify their destructive tendencies. This belief was one source of his enthusiastic campaigning, along with Leo Abse and others, for the abolition of the death penalty. He put in a huge amount of effort into treating these people, not least in dealing with the disturbing projections from them that he had to digest.
When I was approached, in the early 90s, by a neighbourhood Chalk Farm policeman, and was asked to propose some form of therapeutic opportunity for couples who had experienced domestic violence, it was Hyatt whom I approached. He readily engaged in the project, and we saw several couples, until the policeman whose idea it was was posted to another station and replaced by someone who took a more disciplinarian approach to the problem.
Hyatt worked long- and short-term with people who might well, without his help, have committed violent acts. It is hard to lay out the evidence for the value of such preventive work, though most people in this room would have no doubt of it.
Hyatt was one of those psychoanalysts who combined their very high level of commitment to psychoanalysis with an equally passionate dedication to the public sector. Moreover, where tough work was to be done – with disturbed adolescents, or with psychotically depressed post-partum mothers, or with people who committed domestic violence, say – there Hyatt would be.
As a child brought up in a family of modest means on the Wirral, Hyatt developed a lifelong passion for nature. At the age of thirteen, he was so fascinated by the butterflies on his visit to the local Natural History Museum collection that the curator asked his mother if the young enthusiast could come each week and help. Indeed he first wanted to become a zoologist. Instead, partly as a result of winning a scholarship, he studied medicine at Liverpool University, later specializing as a psychiatrist. He went on to train as a psychoanalyst, qualifying in 1952.
The outbreak of World War 2 occurred when Hyatt was 25. During the war he did three years’ service in military hospitals, followed by three years in military psychiatry with Indian troops, in India and Burma. He was mentioned in dispatches for his work in a forward area. He was also involved as a psychiatrist in the War Office Selection Boards.
Hyatt was always down to earth and practical, as well as alert to psychodynamic forces that are not so commonly recognised. He was proud of an innovation he brought in for his Indian soldiers; in the great heat of Indian summers, he ordered them to remove their socks for long marches. He believed this simple move saved lives.
One of his stories from this vivid period concerned his calling a fellow
officer a “moronic psychopath”. The officer complained to
the commander,
who listened carefully and said, “This is a serious situation.
I have known
Dr Williams for a long time and have followed his work closely. I have
never known him to be wrong in the diagnoses he makes.”
After the war, Hyatt started the analytic training. His first analyst
was Elizabeth Rosenberg (later Zetzel), but she returned to America
after a year. Then he went to Eva Rosenfeld, who had helped Freud and
his family leave Vienna in 1938 before herself settling in London.
Hyatt worked first in Maidstone, Kent, and then, during the
1950s, began a part-time involvement with criminals at Wormwood Scrubs
prison. This became the field of his most significant
life-work. No doubt for personal reasons, but also to help him in dealing
with the destructiveness of some of his patients, he went back into
analysis, first with Melanie Klein - as one of her last two patients
-
then, after her death in 1960, with Hanna Segal.
In 1962, he joined the staff of the Tavistock as a consultant psychiatrist. He subsequently became chair of the adolescent department (1969-78). He played a big role in the recognition of adolescence as a specific entity, rather than as merely an intermediate waiting period between childhood and adulthood.
His psychoanalytic work included treatment of adolescents and adults presenting a full range of difficulties.
Hyatt’s book Cruelty, Violence and Murder (1998) outlines his
concept of
the “death constellation” which means, I think, the tilting
of the balance between destructive and constructive elements in the
personality, such that in some cases, for a combination of constitutional
and environmental reasons, an imbalance towards destructiveness arises.
When this imbalance coalesces into a character trait or an ongoing island
in the personality, the person has to kill off whatever is too painful.
Hyatt showed how through a relationship in which mourning and remorse
becomes possible, people in such states can be helped to find their
more human potential. He stressed that mourning is indispensable for
mental health in general, as well as in the processing of murderousness
arising from the death constellation.
He himself was no stranger to loss and mourning. When his first two
wives,
both psychoanalysts, died relatively young, Hyatt was devastated, and
characteristically not ashamed to show it and share it. In 1987 he married
Gianna Henry, well known to everyone here as a distinguished child psychotherapist
and psychoanalyst.
I won’t say more about Hyatt’s love of nature and literature, except that it does seem to me to be one of the best uses of those hothouse south facing consulting rooms in this building to grow, as he did, aubergines in pots on the window sill.
Hyatt taught and lectured widely, not only in England but in Australia, the US, Italy and Spain.
Hyatt was a Fellow (used to be called Member) of the Institute, and became a Training Analyst in 1968. From 1982 to 1985 he was director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis, where he is remembered as having been straightforward and helpful to colleagues and students alike. He was an excellent supervisor; I remember him as the supervisor or the Camden Psychotherapy Unit speaking about a patient who had dreams of working for the charity War on Want. Hyatt’s comments about her making war on her own wanting helped me to understand in a new way something about the death instinct. This was a typical intervention: bold, insightful, graphic and non-judgmental. It was characteristic too of his love of and respect for word play.
Hyatt recalled becoming the target of a lorry driver’s rage while
he was
driving back from treating a murderer in Pentonville prison. After Hyatt
had managed to defuse the situation, the lorry driver said “If
you don’t want to get into a fight you’d better not look
like that” – which Hyatt took as a helpful warning to him
to create more space for himself after such work in order to separate
himself better from the impact of the murderer’s personality.
After his official retirement from his NHS post in 1979, Hyatt continued
to
teach at the Tavistock and to co-chair a workshop in the adolescent
department for at least another 20 years, well into his 80s. He also
worked
as a psychoanalyst up to the age of 86, and as a supervisor to 88.
Hyatt does live on in all of us, in our affectate memories of him, and of course he lives on in the large family who survive him – in Gianna, in his four sons, twelve grandchildren, four stepdaughters, and several great-grandchildren.