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The author, who trained in the British Psychoanalytical Society with Nina Coltart, presents his recollections of his valued colleague and friend. Coltart is commended for having told the truth about what went on in her consulting room. Her many contributions not only to the British Society but also to other psychotherapy groups are recalled, as are her notable gifts as a consultant. Coltart was a cultivated and deeply caring person who, paradoxically, had few close friends.
I met Nina when we started our analytic training in the autumn of 1961. There were twelve students in our class and it was clear that we all had very different backgrounds; the desire to become an analyst was probably the only factor that we shared. We listened to lectures in respectful silence, but when invited to ask questions some of our individual characteristics came to the surface. Some of us simply asked no questions and others asked for clarification of arguments that had been put forward, but we also had colleagues who seemed to challenge the lecturer, as if he had failed to do justice to what the particular student believed was correct. In other words, what he was coming to learn were the tenets of his training analyst . . .
In those days our Society was going through fundamental changes. I remember attending a Society scientific meeting where a speaker protested that he saw no reason for his being suddenly classified as part of a "Middle Group": he argued that only the arrival from the Continent of the two famous ladies- Anna Freud and Melanie Klein-and the increasing number of their followers was forcing what had always been simply "the British Society" to split into these three groups. The Society now offered two training programs: group A contained students from the Kleinian group and those of the Middle Group, while B was for the Anna Freud students. It was some years later that the "Middle" group became the "Independent" group.
An interesting phenomenon could be observed at scientific meetings. A speaker would read his paper and after an interval the discussion took place. The group differences became obvious. Freudian analysts seemed to speak exactly the same language. Kleinian analysts made their contributions, but again they...