Arthur Hyatt Williams, psychoanalyst and criminologist, was born on 23rd September 1914 and brought up in the Wirral. He studied medicine at Liverpool University. As a teenager he was already passionately interested in natural history and poetry, particularly Shakespeare. He married Lorna Bunting in 1939. At the outbreak of the second World War he volunteered for far-eastern army service, specialising in psychiatry in India – work on which his MD thesis was based, highlighting the different pattern of breakdown in British and Indian troops. He was appointed consultant psychiatrist at Oakwood Hospital Maidstone in 1948, and later took over responsibility for the new Day Hospital. He qualified as an analyst with the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1952, and moved to London in 1958 on account of his analysis with Melanie Klein, which continued until her death in 1960. He started work at the Tavistock Clinic London in 1962, and was appointed chairman of the Adolescent Unit in 1969, continuing until his retirement from the NHS in 1979. In 1998 his book Cruelty, Violence and Murder was published, based on his experiences treating murderers. His lifelong interest in helping with mourning was reflected in papers based on Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci. He died on 27th August 2009 after a prolonged illness. For obituaries see The Independent 8th October 2009 and The Guardian 11th October 2009.
There is a Memorial gathering for Arthur at the Tavistock Clinic in London on Friday 14th May 2010.
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