When Elizabeth Spillius, who has died aged 92, first read Sigmund Freud as a 16-year-old, she “found his attitude to women so off-putting” that she “didn’t read very far”. Exploring the work of Melanie Klein 11 years later in 1951, however, was another matter. Elizabeth herself recalled thinking: “This is it – the approach for me!” She was fascinated by the way Klein had developed a method of observing children at play, through which they could express their ideas and feelings, often before they could be articulated in words.
These detailed observations led Klein to develop a view of the importance of the unconscious fantasies the child’s play expressed – an inner world full of figures interacting in both loving and aggressive ways, and she regarded this as a useful model for understanding the unconscious mind of the adult as well.
Elizabeth continued to study Klein’s ideas, becoming one of Britain’s leading psychoanalysts and one of the world’s leading Kleinian scholars. Her great gift was to illuminate and clarify Klein’s theories for herself, and for the next generation of psychoanalysts, as well as psychotherapists, social workers and university students.
Elizabeth was born in Toronto to Edward Bott and his wife, Helen (nee McMurchie), who were of British descent. Her father, who grew up poor, earned his way through university and was the first head of the University of Toronto’s psychology department. Her mother, also academic, wrote two books on child development. Elizabeth was the youngest of three daughters in a close-knit family. Her father built the family a log cabin on the lake at Muskoka, north of Toronto, which remained a magical place in Elizabeth’s memory, and which she thought of as home.
After completing a degree in psychology from Toronto in 1945, where she became friendly with the celebrated sociologist Erving Goffman, Elizabeth became intrigued by the pioneering work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. She moved to Chicago to complete an MA in social anthropology, where her professor recognised that with her interest in Malinowski’s method of “participant observation” – immersing oneself in the social life of the group being studied – and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown’s notion of society as a self-maintaining system of interlocking social roles, customs and beliefs, she would feel more at home working in Britain.
Arriving in London in 1949 for her PhD at the LSE, she was soon advised by her tutor to look into the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, then at the vanguard of social sciences and applied psychology.
She joined a project studying 20 East End families. Her fieldwork led to the groundbreaking theory that the internal culture and social organisation of a family depended on the particular way they were connected with the network of people and organisations outside the family. She found, for example, that the more connected the network, the stricter the division of labour between husband and wife. She described her findings in her book Family and Social Network (1957). It established the framework for the study of the postwar family, and is still in use today.
In the same year she married James Spillius, a fellow Canadian anthropologist at the LSE, and in 1958 accompanied him to Tonga, where he had been sent on a project by the World Health Organisation.
The stay in the South Pacific delayed the psychoanalytical training she had just begun, but Elizabeth characteristically seized the opportunity to study Tonga’s uniquely well-preserved Polynesian system of monarchy and kinship, in close collaboration with Queen Sālote.
Returning to London, her passion for understanding the nature of social systems and the dynamic forces that operated within them became directed to the study of psychoanalytical ideas, structure and methodology.
A marvellous editor, she was generous and supportive, while always challenging the writer to make his or her ideas clear and accessible. She edited the collection of papers in the two-volume Melanie Klein Today, which is widely used throughout the world and was translated into many languages.
In addition, she wrote a number of valuable psychoanalytical papers, collected in Encounters with Melanie Klein (2007). Her lucid writing can be illustrated by the opening line of her paper on envy: “Envy is disturbing – a disturbing feeling and a disturbing concept in psychoanalysis.” She then proceeds to differentiate two varieties of envy. In the first, which is generally unconscious, the person’s envious response to otherness, especially to goodness in others, may evoke a variety of attacks on the other (and/or on themselves). If the individual does become aware of their envious, destructive impulses, this arouses pain and guilt. In the second form, however, which Spillius labels as “impenitent”, the individual is conscious of his envy, but does not suffer from conscious guilt and a sense of responsibility for his envy. Rather, he thinks it is the envied person’s fault that the envious person feels envy.
Elizabeth explored the way psychoanalytic technique has evolved since Freud and Klein, and the increasing understanding of the way in which the analyst’s responses to the patient can be an important source of information both about himself, but also about his patient’s inner world. She returns again and again to the need for the psychoanalyst to be a “participant observer” – recognising as best he can what is going on in his patient, in himself, and between the two of them.
While developing her own firmly held point of view, she remained endlessly curious about the points of view of others. Her stance was never moralising. Consistent with her anthropologist’s perspective, she was always interested to see how things work – whether a social system, the patient’s unconscious mind or interaction with others.
She remained interested in comparing the aims of and differences between her two fields of study – anthropology and psychoanalysis: “Both disciplines aim to study human nature, especially the human mind, but they study different expressions of it: anthropology studies its expression in social behaviours and cultural practices and beliefs; psychoanalysis … studies its expression particularly in the analyst-patient interaction.”
After a long period as honorary secretary of the Melanie Klein Trust, she became its archivist, delving enthusiastically into the extensive Klein archive held in the Wellcome Trust. She was fascinated by the early, largely unpublished clinical and theoretical material – some of it handwritten in Gothic German script, some typed, with many corrections, on thin blue paper – and she began to publish her findings.
Elizabeth helped to present Klein’s rich and fertile clinical insights into the world in a way that brought out their depth and originality, to the great benefit of those interested in child analysis and the development of the unconscious mind. In 2010 she was made a distinguished fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
She was a stylish dresser and a wonderful cook and host at her home in West Hampstead. Despite poor health in her later years, she never lost her wise, keen interest in the lives and minds of others. Her marriage to James was dissolved in the 1970s. She is survived by her daughter, Sisifa, and son, Alex, and three grandchildren.
• Elizabeth Jane Spillius, psychoanalyst, born 3 March 1924; died 4 July 2016
