Obituary: Paul Gordon

My colleague and friend, the psychotherapist, author and campaigner Paul Gordon, has died aged 70. While eschewing the limelight, Gordon was an influential and unique voice in the world of contemporary psychotherapy. Author of over 10 books, and multiple articles, he was for many years Chair of the Philadelphia Association, originally founded by the brilliant if mercurial R.D. Laing. He wrote a number of papers in the BJP, perhaps most notably in the early days about race and psychoanalysis, such as Souls in Armour: Thoughts on psychoanalysis and Racism (Gordon, 1993a) and Keeping Therapy White (Gordon, 1993b), as well as works linking psychotherapy and the arts such as The Celluloid Couch: Representations of Psychotherapy in Cinema (Gordon, 1994). The papers about race and politics were part of his transition from a more campaigning early adulthood into a socially informed psychotherapy. Born in Glasgow in 1954 to Stanley Gordon, businessman, and Wilma Donaldson, speech and play therapist at psychoanalytically informed Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic, Paul attended St. Aloysius College and then studied jurisprudence at Glasgow University. He then worked at the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties where he organized the first Scottish Conference on Children's Rights in 1978, and remarkably took the case that ended corporal punishment in Scottish schools to the European Court of Human Rights, ending the use of the dreaded tawse (leather belt). In 1980, Paul moved to London to work for the Runnymede Trust, where his prolific campaigning and writing, including at least six books, focused mostly on racism, discrimination and social policy. Some of his more important pre-therapy writings included White Law: Racism in the Policy, Courts and Prisons (Gordon, 1983) and New Right, New Racism (Gordon & Klug, 1987), and in 1992, along with Yasmin Alibhai Brown, he gave the Annual Lecture for the Race Relations, entitled Race Equality in Europe: Problems and Potential. His political commitment and determination to improve people's lives led him to train as a psychotherapist at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies, and later at the Philadelphia Association. It was at the Philadelphia Association that he really came into his own and developed his philosophy. His first major work there was Face to Face (Gordon, 1999) in which he outlined a model of therapy deeply rooted in philosophy and literature from Merleau-Ponty to Husserl and Emanuel Levinas. While taking seriously the importance of the external world, he made a case for how authentic human presence and conversation could be transformative. He wrote ‘The process of therapy and being a self is one in which people come to speak from a place of authenticity, in their own words and in their own idiom – to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’. In Face to Face, he wrote ‘whatever else we do as psychotherapists we wait, wait for, we wait with and we wait upon those who come to see us; we wait and we witness. …. Waiting witnessing and naming all require a lot of effort’. Indeed, they do and he could and did make that effort. He challenged contemporary developments in mental health, particularly the juggernaut of easy diagnosis and increasing medication, and alongside others such as Darian Leader, made a powerful case against the dangers of bureaucratization and over professionalization of psychotherapy via state regulation. Gordon argued for a different way to engage patients, based on conversation and being present with another, a vision that is at risk of getting lost in a contemporary world of time-limited therapies based on guidelines and protocols and mass diagnosis and medication. His beliefs aligned well with The Philadelphia Association which is an organization with a radical mission and a uniquely questioning and philosophical bent. It has also, in classic Laingian tradition, overseen and facilitated therapeutic houses on a therapeutic community model, which aimed to be genuine places of sanctuary. The aspiration behind such work was stated by Gordon in An Uneasy Dwelling (Gordon, 2010) where he wrote ‘We cannot make people feel at home but we hope that they may come to feel more at home in themselves and in the world’. Gordon was not only chair of the PA for many years, shepherding it into the contemporary era with a careful eye on safeguarding its unique ethos and beliefs, but he also worked for many years as a ‘house’ therapist and chronicled the remarkable history and nature of this aspect of the PA's work in several books. Long before concepts of ‘home’ became sociologically fashionable, the PA houses were designed as literally ‘homes’ or places of safety and asylum. In them, people in distress could, and still can, find their own ways through suffering, in the context of a supportive and thoughtful community with the presence of therapeutic support, but without the contemporary psychiatric imperatives of over-medication and risk aversion. The houses were accessible to all, not the privilege of the wealthy, which was important to Gordon who spent many years offering low- or no-cost therapy, such as at Open Door and Freedom from Torture, and he was also one of the central figures in the Free Psychotherapy network. For him, as for R.D. Laing and many others, as he wrote in a Guardian letter: ‘Behind every symptom and every appeal for medication is a story, and the silencing of those stories can be as much the cause of suffering as the details of the life itself’. He railed against a symptom led medical model which could pathologize people, and along with his friends and colleagues, the luminaries Peter Lomas and David Smail, he forcefully argued that social conditions and life events external to an individual should often be understood as the root of most people's mental health issues, rather than blaming a suffering individual. He wrote ‘A task of therapy is to help people situate their suffering in a context, by helping people recognise that their lives are shaped by social economic political forces can help people feel less powerless and alone’, and quoting Sartre, ‘can convert passivity into action’. In a book he co-edited about the PA houses, Between Psychotherapy and Philosophy (Gordon & Mayo, 2004), he wrote, we cannot collude with the myth that people's problems are somehow in them, in a so-called internal world he went on ‘If psychoanalysis had been around at the time of slavery would it have told slaves that their problem stemmed from their internal worlds?’ Gordon's commitment to social justice burnt bright throughout his working life. For several years, he was an editor of the radical journal Free Associations, alongside its founder Bob Young. Here, Gordon ensured that psychoanalytic ideas did not exist in a vacuum but were always linked with discourses from phenomenology, political and social theory as well as literature and arts. For many this approach offered a beacon of hope at a time of inward retreat and conformism in the profession. He also wrote regularly for the TLS and did occasional features in Guardian and Independent. He was a man of great erudition but without a pretentious bone in his body, and he could dive deeply into rabbit holes too challenging for most of us. Whether writing or talking about Husserl or Cornelius Castoriadis, R.S. Thomas or E P Thompson, he could integrate the insights of these thinkers into his own writing and professional work and had a gift for making the complex understandable. Perhaps his most important book about his profession, The Hope of Therapy (Gordon, 2008), best conveyed his vision for psychotherapy, a vision both obvious and intangible, making central the power of ordinary conversation to transform. Conversation with Paul Gordon was always more extraordinary than ordinary. It could almost feel as if his decades of seeking, inner work, reading and thinking was all undertaken for the purpose of being in this very moment with whoever he was with, as was attested to by the many communications from grateful ex-patients and students since his death. An admirer and colleague of the writers John Berger and Anne Michaels, literature and the arts infused his thinking and he co-curated an exhibition on poet Paul Celan for the Southbank Centre in 2010. His final book, Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (Gordon, 2013), paid tribute to the revolutionary writer who had greatly inspired him. He wrote ‘Art, like therapy at its best, reminds us of and provides a space for the inherent complexity and ambiguity of life. It challenges any tendency to simplify, to smoothen, to flatten, to reduce.’ That is a message the modern world needs to hear! In his final decade, Paul suffered from a debilitating neurodegenerative disease. A militant supporter of assisted dying, he chose to end his own life by VSED (voluntarily stopping eating and drinking). He is survived by his wife, the writer Melissa Benn and their daughters Hannah and Sarah, who cared for him lovingly and devotedly right to the end. I end with a quote from The Hope of Therapy which sums up much of his philosophy and his way of being with others. ‘All the qualities of a good friendship, a welcome, an acceptance, a letting be, a hospitality, an attunement, an attentiveness, a suspension of self-interest, a questioning, a criticism, a distance that does not yet pretend to objectivity, an engagement, a faith in the other, a commitment to truth- fulness, and above all perhaps a responsibility to the other – these surely are the qualities also of an ethical therapy.’ I believe he truly knew how to be a good friend and therapist and will be sorely missed.