Tom Ormay (1934–2022)

I must have first met Tom Ormay late in the 1980s. I found him a little difficult to understand at first but quite quickly grew to like his quiet manner that at times could also boil up and over when he met too much bureaucratic questioning whenever he had to propose something formally and he was then met with blockhead opposition. Otherwise, he was a gentle man who came at the prevailing situation in a quiet approach and occasionally with an outburst of temper, which was never born long and never with ill-will. He was a poet who was quiet about his poetry, yet who adorned his book on ‘Nos’ with many poetic quotations—you don’t see many of these in books on group analysis or even psychoanalysis. Freud’s assessment that