In one short bio written not long before her death, Cathy summarised her work and interests as follows: “She has a background in developmental psychology and her current research topics include group processes between infants, Autistic Spectrum Disorder from clinical and psychosocial perspectives and clinician friendly ways of evaluating psychotherapeutic effectiveness. She is especially interested in the use of psychoanalytic infant observation as a research method appropriate to studying individuals and groups across the lifespan”. At that point in her career, Cathy was a consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and Research Fellow at the Tavistock Centre, where in addition to her clinical and research work, she taught on Professional Doctorate Programmes in Child Psychotherapy and Social Work. She never left behind her early training as a developmental psychologist and researcher with a special interest in language development. She brought these into an ongoing creative conversation with her two trainings in psychoanalytic psychotherapy (child and adult).
We found many well-developed papers and written talks which had never been published and are made available here for the first time. We also bring together an impressive array of her book reviews. We unearthed an unfinished book draft entitled ‘Psychotherapy and Infancy’, which was intended as a teaching text and draws on her experience of teaching this topic to students at the Tavistock Centre. The first sentence reads as follows “This is a book about models of infancy in different psychoanalytic theories, how these have evolved, and their implications for psychotherapeutic technique, or how we work with our adult patients in the consulting room”. The book is arranged in chapters that cover the major models of infancy: mostly the great psychoanalytic thinkers – Freud, Anna Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Bowlby (including attachment theory) and a chapter on neuroscience. We must assume that Cathy regarded this as unready for publication and welcome suggestions about how it might be made available, for example from students who were taught by Cathy on these topics.
Four people, Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine, have worked to set up this website, with the committed administrative and professional support of Sharon Shoesmith, financial support from Cathy Urwin’s sister, Pauline and technical support from Colin McMahon. The four of us, plus Cathy, wrote a book together, first published in 1984 (‘Changing the Subject’) and in 2010 began to reconvene as a group within which to discuss our work, consider writing something together again in the future and generally to enjoy the experience of sharing ideas with a group that stretched back into our early adulthoods. When Cathy died, at such a shockingly young age, we knew how engaged she was with research, teaching, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, involvement in the Association of Child Psychotherapists, travelling to conferences, reading multiple literatures, and more. We felt expanded by her insights, were changed with the subtle help of her wisdom, sought her advice on our writing and research.
Her papers and digital files were in a bit of a mess; unsurprising of someone who worked such long hours and had so many projects on the go simultaneously. The idea of organising an archive at first seemed daunting, but we reckoned that if anyone was able to do it, we were. Here it is, coupled with a memorial event, to celebrate Cathy’s work and especially to draw attention to its extraordinary range, a diversity of topics about which even we knew only a limited amount. We had animated discussions about how to define the main categories. The following were obviously salient, arising in the practice of sorting out the files:
o Autistic Spectrum Disorder (a meld of case work practice and theory);
o Infant sociability/babies in groups (includes her early PhD work on blind babies and her recent collaboration with Ben Bradley and Jane Selby on group life in babies);
o Infant mental health (a theme that informed a great deal of her work, of course, given her profession as a child psychotherapist, it also includes an engagement with attachment theory and an exploration of the practice differences in Eastern and western culture);
o Hopes and Expectations for Treatment (HETA)/ case management (as a child psychotherapist who worked for fifteen years in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets with a large Bangladeshi-heritage population, Cathy developed a user-friendly evaluation format).
o Infant Observation (taught to Tavistock students and, in collaboration with Wendy Hollway, led its use as a research method. As a result she wrote on the substantive issue of changing identity in new mothers and on researcher subjectivity as a tool for exploring culture.
o Looked after Children. In this context, as in others, she explored the implications of the subjective experience of this group and its implications for how they are helped.
Underpinning this diversity is a trinity of themes – babies’ sociability and language development; psychoanalysis/psychotherapy; researching and methodology - which extends over time and gets richer with proliferating linkages (it also suggests that categorisation of Cathy’s work obstructs as much as it clarifies).
There is a danger of understating Cathy’s early writing, before she trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, as a PhD student and as a lecturer in developmental psychology at Nottingham University and we hope that the material provided here of her early writing – from language development in blind children, through the relation of psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, to ‘the persuasion of normal development’ - will show what an incisive writing style, theoretically-sophisticated mind was already at work.