As a doctor, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author, Robin Skynner, who died on September 24th aged 78, was a 20th century mental health pioneer. He contributed to major changes in clinical practice and professional training, and leaves a legacy in the practice of family, marital and group therapy, and through books like Families And How To Survive Them, which made psychology accessible to lay readers, put analytic insights on to high street bookshop shelves.
His mother, he recalled, worried whether he would end up a genius or a lunatic. With hindsight he realised that, lacking the resources for the first option, he spent much of his life trying to avoid the second. He ultimately compromised by entering a mental hospital through the staff entrance.
The oldest of five sons born in Charlestown in Cornwall, Robin Skynner's father had a family business mining and shipping china clay and his mother was a local fisherman's daughter. He was educated at St Austell County School and Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon. In 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force and spent 30 months training pilots in Britain and Canada. He then flew fighter-bombers on low-level raids.
Post-war, he qualified in medicine at University College Hospital, London, and in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. There he specialised in child psychiatry. He became a consultant at Woodberry Down Child Guidance Unit and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, serving north-east London and the East End, and had a major influence introducing family therapy to Britain. He was made a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists on its formation and was later elected a fellow.
He left child guidance in 1970 to become senior tutor in psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley hospitals. He retired from university and National Health Service teaching in 1982.
While at the Maudsley he met S.H. Foulkes, a psychoanalyst who had come from Germany in the 1930s and who had developed "group analysis", a group approach to the treatment of war neuroses. Robin Skynner was an early member of the Group Analytic Society and, with Foulkes and others went on to establish the Group Analytic Practice which provided him with a professional home for the next 30 years. Here they developed individual, group, family and marital therapies. The practice continues to flourish.
In the 1960s they were in demand as trainers and the introductory course Robin Skynner established led to the formation of the Institute of Group Analysis, which offers clinical training and a qualification in psychotherapy and is the main training centre for group therapy in Britain. In the 1970s he developed a programme which grew into the Institute of Family Therapy.
His first two books, One Flesh, Separate Persons: Principles Of Family and Marital Psychotherapy (1976) and Families And How To Survive Them (1983) have been continuously in print. The latter, co-written with actor John Cleese, has sold 353,000 copies in English editions and has been translated into 10 other languages.
In the group analytic approach, as he describes it, the therapist exposes himself to the dynamics of those he is treating, remains closely attentive to his own responses and emotions and passes this back as information about himself in a careful and considered way. Robin Skynner had a rare capacity to compose himself in the presence of others' emotions and to master the terms of their predicament in ways that were often very practical.
His inquiry was focused by his struggle to deal with the confusion and distress of his own upbringing and he remained profoundly interested in the life of the family.
He was a spiritual man, enriched by a long association with the Gurdjieff Society, and his experience of meditation lent a special quality to his attentiveness with people. He had the bearing of authority and a strong, containing physical presence. During his early training he had been influenced by a group of philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, whose ideas influenced his own conceptual clarity and his publications introduce many original concepts to the field.
Cleese wrote after Robin Skynner's death that he had never met a man who knew so much about people. "He had a wonderfully unorthodox yet systematic mind: what was so special about him was that he never allowed himself to get stuck in theory as he was continually questioning it in the light of his own experience."
Some of the things Robin Skynner said about S.H. Foulkes when he celebrated his colleague's life could well be said of himself. Foulkes, he had said, had an open, curious questioning attitude, always stepping back to examine the ground that he himself had just been standing on, and by that example aroused others to do the same. Foulkes and Robin Skynner took everything seriously, yet took nothing too seriously.
For his last 12 years Robin Skynner enjoyed a relationship with Welsh landscape painter Josh Partridge, who provided inspired care after he suffered a serious stroke in 1993 following the publication of his last book, Life And How To Survive It (1993), also written with Cleese.
His first speaking engagement after the stroke was the Jonathan Swift Founder's Day Lecture at St Patrick's Hospital Dublin in 1994. He travelled by himself and returned, elated, to report that his host, Anthony Clare, thanked him not only for the content of his lecture but for demonstrating to the audience by his spirit and bearing that there was no reason to fear old age.
"Simply by his presence, he taught us something about enjoyment of life, of learning," he had said of Foulkes, "of learning with each other." It was just as true of Robin Skynner.
He is survived by his son David and daughter Rosie.
Augustus Charles Robin Skynner: born 1922; died, September 2000