Memories from Colleagues

For many years Morris and I worked for the same NHS Trust in East London. He was managing the Psychology service and I managed the Psychotherapy clinic. Both services provided Group Psychotherapy, employed Group Analysts, and offered placements and supervision to IGA-London qualifying course students.

On my first year as a Qualifying Course student, Morris who, I think was on his last year, presented his theory paper on ‘The anti-group’ at the IGA, at one the lectures we had on Monday evenings organised by the Group Analytic Society. I felt that if a student could be celebrated for revising and adding new concepts to Foulksian theory, I was in the right place.

Once I qualified, I was invited to join a newly formed Peer Supervision Group that we named ‘Nexus’. Morris and I have been members of that group until his sudden demise last week. We have shared and helped each other with our clinical work as well as our personal dilemmas, we have grown old together.

Morris other passion, painting, was also shared with the group, with invitations to his exhibitions and verbal illustrations about the artistic process.

He leaves, for me, a deep empty emotional space as well as many rich and cherished memories.

Carmen O’Leary

Such a deep sadness together with the blessing of meeting him for first time a month ago, 7-8 October,   he came to Turin for a workshop on Trauma and Creativity in our learning community. We had a supervision session in our Group Analytic Practice, a very meaningful work that opened up to new thoughts, and then on the next day the workshop where he spoke of life – his, ours, theirs – through his paintings and a movie where painting and dance were the main languages, universal. It was very intense.

Here we are all in dismay and sadness, but also with the richness of the encounter with his vitality, openess, generosity, humanity, depth.

Ciao Morris, ci hai lasciato pensieri fertili, sapremo averne cura e coltivarli.

Alice Mulasso

I’m shocked and saddened to hear of Morris’s death. I so enjoyed our meetings and his warm and gentle style. To know someone so brilliant and so human and willing to show it was truly a pleasure.

The last time I saw him was in New York at the AGPA conference in March 2020 when I volunteered to be part of a demonstration group working with some of his paintings of dolls. One of the paintings was named “Martha” and I found the way he worked with the group and the paintings a fascinating way to explore identity.

Such a sad loss and a pity he won’t be here to celebrate his new book, art opening, and expanding interests.

Martha Gilmore

I am still dumbfounded. I have fond memories of my meetings with Morris. We had a very warm and intimate talk at the IAGP in Colombia in 2014, in which we discussed his attitude towards the social unconscious concept. He said that he does not know how to apply it clinically. I told him that his anti-group concept can be part of unconscious social processes and that he can write a chapter for one of the volumes of the book series that Earl and I co-edit. It took a few years before it materialized, and in 2019 he wrote a fascinating chapter for our 4th volume about his dolls paintings and how it relates to the SU. It was a very unique and creative chapter and Earl and I were in the process of editing it while he decided to publish his own book and include that chapter in it. I was disappointed and we had a very honest communication about my feelings and our connection.

I really miss him.

Haim Weinberg