Arthur Hyatt Williams - A Personal View
By Robin Anderson
I first met Arthur Hyatt Williams when I was 18 through his son Jonathan
one of my oldest friends. My knowledge of psychoanalysis at that time
was more or less confined to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I had
never met a real live analyst. I now found myself in the midst a family
where psychoanalysis had a central place. Arthur’s (first) wife
Lorna was also an analyst and he was having an analysis with this woman
called Melanie Klein who they all thought was very important. Jonathan
was also in analysis and so I found myself up close to this extraordinary
endeavour. I was very interested and I began to have a strong sense
that analysis might be something for me too.
My first meeting with Arthur was in his enormous walled garden at his
house, Barming Place in Maidstone. He was wearing khaki shorts and was
holding a garden fork. He looked at me closely, in fact right into me,
but interestingly I did not feel at all threatened as there was no hostility
in this look. It was intense and curious but warm and just a little
bit mischievous. This was my first encounter with the qualities that
were so developed in him and were present so many of his dealings with
the world. Later could see this as a passionate curiosity in the living
world and especially people and what made them as they were. The garden
that lay all round him was an important domain and it was bursting with
life. It was clear that the prolific flowers and vegetables in it were
thriving under his care.
I found myself welcomed into the family, and was very taken by Arthur’s infectious enthusiasm about analysis which was frequently discussed at the dining table. He was interested in anybody who shared his curiosity and was generous in passing on whatever he knew and making it more accessible. At that time he was also working with murderers at Wormwood Scrubs, naturally grabbing the attention of an 18 year-old. Just as he could grow plants so he seemed to have a facility to enthuse those with an interest in the human psyche.
He was something of a missionary but he pursued this by making psychoanalysis sound fascinating not by preaching. One of the local general practitioners who I met at Barming was Donald (Dicky) Bird who had also come under his spell and who was at that time training as an analyst and became well known as an adolescent psychiatrist at The Northgate Clinic and later succeeded Arthur as Chairman of the Adolescent Department here at the Tavistock Clinic. I later realised that he and I were part of a very larger number of people who later trained at the Institute and at the Tavistock Clinic who had been influenced by Arthur. In my case the influence was something of a dormant seed for many years while I studied medicine and trained as a physician. However I later came back to the world of psychoanalysis and psychiatry and when I told him that I was looking for an analyst he sent me to Hanna Segal for a consultation. I knew that he had himself been in analysis with her after Melanie Klein's death and I was thrilled (though a little nervous) when she offered me a vacancy. Although he never said so, and of course Hanna Segal didn't either, I was sure that he had put in a good word for me and I still think this is probably true. Much later I too arrived in the Adolescent Department and was proud to have followed in his footsteps as chairman.
He felt that the capacity for mourning was central in the acquisition of mental health and he himself was faced with this very centrally in his life with the tragic loss first of Lorna and then his second wife Shiona with cancer. He felt that the capacity for mourning was missing in most murderers but just a few found some lost seeds of this which could begin to grow under his devoted care and although they could never get over what they had done they were to some extent able to get on with their lives when they could face what they had done.
He was a very brave man not only in the battlefield but also in his clinical work. He had some close escapes from being attacked by some of these violent patients. I remember him much later telling me that on his way home to his house in Islington some young men had tried to mug him. Arthur summed up the situation and concluded that these lads were looking for an object into which to project weak and frightened aspects of themselves, and he decided that he had to demonstrate that he was not available for such a transaction. He faced them, pulled himself up, and quite suddenly roared at them. They looked very surprised and anxious and retreated from him and he walked on to his house. A dangerous strategy perhaps but it worked and was typical of this combination in him of courage, originality and a certain amount of risk-taking.
He always retained some of the qualities of a rather carefree boy in this way. He was at his best in live clinical discussions and he was immensely sought-after as a teacher nationally and internationally. He was able to bring some of his original ideas about murder and murderers together in his book Cruelty Violence and Murder as well as publishing a number of other interesting papers. I think he was a wonderful, original and accomplished analyst and teacher. I remember him especially for his generosity to me. I owe him an immense debt and miss him.