John Southgate: pioneer of attachment-based psychotherapy

Abstract

Back in the summer of 1986, more than thirty-five years ago, I had the privilege of chairing a special symposium on “Psycho/Analysis” at Keynes College, in the University of Kent at Canterbury. Whilst I cannot recall very much about the contents of this event, I do remember the tremendous pleasure of having met John Southgate—one of the key invited speakers—for the very first time. During the 1980s, long before the creation of any formal registration bodies such as the British Psychoanalytic Council or the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, most British psychoanalysts and psychotherapists comported themselves in a very sectarian and hierarchical manner. Freudians rarely talked to Jungians; Kleinians loathed speaking to Winnicottians; and very few members of the psychoanalytical establishment even acknowledged the existence of clinicians from the humanistic psychotherapy traditions. In retrospect, one might well describe that period of psychological history as somewhat narrow-minded and elitist, with little respect for theoretical diversity. But John Southgate stood out most uniquely as an individual whom one could not classify as a “Freudian” or a “Jungian”. Rather, he had long identified himself as a “barefoot psychoanalyst” who endeavoured to assist his clients to undertake their own “self analysis”—a rather different conceptualisation from the more traditional model in which the analyst would “treat” the “patient”. Within moments of meeting John in Canterbury and within minutes of hearing him deliver his presentation, championing the importance of secure attachments, I knew that this original man would make a major contribution to our profession. Born on 26 May, 1934, John Peter Southgate grew up in the town of Carlton, on the outskirts of Nottingham, in the East Midlands of England, the only child of Daisy May Clara Highfield Southgate—a market trader from a Jewish background—and of Nolan Southgate—a bus driver from a Protestant family. This couple enjoyed a long and fruitful alliance in spite of the narrow-minded prejudice of certain relations