Abstract
Morris Nitsun died on 10th November 2022. He had recently celebrated his 79th birthday and was preparing the launch of his last book, The Psychotherapist Paints, when he died. The launch due at Gallery Different was to be combined with an exhibition of the paintings contained in the book. He had been suffering from pulmonary fibrosis for some time and, in the nature of this condition, a cold brought on pneumonia and he died a week after admission to University College Hospital, despite the best of care.
He was a veteran practitioner and distinguished writer in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, a valued presence as speaker, teacher and consultant with an international influence in several fields—group analysis, clinical practice and organizational psychology—and beyond his four books he had many publications across these fields. He was also a distinguished painter, won the South African Artist of Fame and Promise competition in 1966 and mounted 11 solo exhibitions of his paintings in London at several different galleries.
Morris was born in Worcester in the Western Cape, South Africa, the youngest of three children of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. His father, Joseph, was a businessman who emigrated from Lithuania in the 1920s, as had his mother, Bessie, (nee Joffee) who—with her own family of origin—had grown up under internal exile in Siberia after the First World War. His parents met and married in Cape Town and moved out, as many Jewish families did, to establish themselves as merchants and traders in country towns. They spoke English, Yiddish and Afrikaans in their home and the Holocaust entered their lives through the losses suffered by both families. Joseph was commercially successful outside the home, but Morris found his religious devotion—imposed on the children—difficult and forbidding. His mother had cultural interests in the arts and Morris was encouraged to paint throughout his childhood. After his older brother Leon went off to boarding school the family returned to Cape Town for a period, living in the coastal resort of Muizenberg before settling in Johannesburg where Morris spent his teenage years attending King David High School.
He went on to study psychology at University of Witwatersrand where he was awarded a PhD in 1967 and he then moved to the UK where he worked in the NHS and he continued with part-time study in painting at Central St. Martins School of Art and Design. In 1973 he was appointed head of the Psychology Department at Goodmayes Hospital Redbridge, East London. He held this post for more than 25 years and turned this department (in the words of one of his appointees) into a ‘breeding ground for clinical psychologists, many of whom went on to achieve great things in their respective fields’. Whilst at Goodmayes he also trained as a group analyst at the Institute of Group Analysis, graduating in 1990. He went on to make a major contribution in the group analytic field and also brought its perspectives into his work as a clinical psychologist and trainer. On retiring from his full-time position at Goodmayes, he moved to a part-time appointment in the Camden and Islington NHS Trust where he ran groups and supervised and trained psychologists until shortly before he died. His dedication and influence across these fields was recognized when he received the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists award for services to mental health in 2015.
I first met Morris and his lifelong partner Tony Fagin together at a Chanukah Party in the mid-1980s at the Rafael Centre—a Jewish counselling service—where Tony and I were both volunteering. They were a warm and engaging couple and we became lifelong friends. He was looking for an analytic training and already had the benefit of a long and productive analysis. One consideration was an application to the Institute of Psychoanalysis but the organization was still closed to entry for gay people. The situation at the Institute of Group Analysis was only a little different and, amongst Morris’s many major contributions was the influence he brought to bear through the course of his own training at the IGA, that helped open the doors of group analytic and later psychoanalytic training, to gay men and women. From his earliest years in South Africa, he lived through many conflicts and was always a rebel with a cause. He engaged strategically over chosen points of contention and usually to good effect. He was sometimes quiet about his engagements—over homosexuality and the acceptance he secured amongst health professionals—and sometimes he took a bold, public position as with his first book, The Anti-Group (1996).
Many of us have struggled with challenges during our training, especially with our first groups. Morris took up the challenge of facing conflict, dishesion and negative therapeutic reaction in the group he ran during his training at the IGA, which he called the anti-group. On completion of the training, he explored this in his theory paper which won the Fernando Arriave Memorial Essay Prize and was published in the journal Group Analysis in 1991. Later, housebound whilst recovering from a broken leg, he turned the paper into a book which he published in 1996. It was a challenging text in its time and has become a source book and guide for trainees and practitioners world-wide—a second edition was published in 2014. Other than the ideas of early pioneers like Foulkes and Bion, Nitsun remains one of only two authors in group psychotherapy who are cited in the leading US textbook on core principles, who come from outside North America (Kaklauskas, 2019). Through the perspectives he describes, group therapy can help us recognize the destructiveness inherent in all our social bonds. He offers the heartening recognition that even destructive processes hold prospects for their own transformation, if openly and honestly addressed in the circles in which we meet. The book gains in urgency and relevance in the violence of our current time.
His third book, Beyond The Anti-Group (2014) takes up this challenge, applying the concept beyond the consulting room to a range of societal settings that he brings together in novel ways including organizations and the arts. He draws on the Foulkesian tradition in group analysis, setting it in a critical frame to question its relevance in a changing world and to highlight new directions. Morris’s second book sits between these two. The Group as an Object of Desire: Exploring Sexuality in Group Therapy (2006) was another original and ground-breaking publication. It demonstrates the potential in group therapy for the most intimate narrative, highlighting current concerns about sexual identity and boundary transgression and it questions what constitutes effective psychotherapy. Clinical illustrations cover the nature of erotic connection, dissociation of desire, the group as witness and erotic transference and countertransference.
Isolated by the pandemic, Morris conducted important online workshops. Reflections on Art and Life through Dolls: The Power of Visual Images to Evoke Personal and Social Themes, was first presented in March 2020, followed by Painting in a Time of Corona, later that year and a dance improvization in 2021, Through The Eye of The Pandemic—the darkness and the light. Part 1, Deserted Cities paints the impact of the pandemic on towns and cities and Part 2, Fragile Nature, describes the return to nature for its healing and in concern for its fragility. It was followed by Dolls Dreams and Demons in 2022.
These online events are now all available on the web and, standing at the heart of his last book, A Psychotherapist Paints (2021), they set its foundations. It grapples with the challenges posed by the duality of healing and creativity. He tells us that the book ‘is unusual not because it concerns a psychotherapist who paints . . . (but) because it concerns a psychotherapist who writes about painting. Few have ventured to write about the convergence,’ he says, citing the one other—Marion Milner’s On not being able to paint (1950), ‘a classic treatise’ he tells us, ‘on a psychoanalyst’s excursion into visual art.’ Nitsun’s own new classic is written by a group analyst who is just as concerned with the relational field as he is with the visual one. The paintings are a mirror of life through the decades and the book is illustrated by 50 of them reproduced in fine colour.
He began this book with a determination to communicate about childhood and society in words, pictures, images and symbols with a receptive audience of friends and colleagues through a new painting subject—Victorian dolls. He set up a group discussion about these paintings first at his second home on the south coast and then at a psychotherapy conference in New York, held by the American Group Psychotherapy Association. His scope widened through the pandemic to address mortality, our denial of death and the fragility of nature. It builds on these subjects working in stages to develop heuristic enquiry (Moustakas 1990), ‘bringing together distinctly different modalities—painting, memoir and group exploration’ to create ‘the artist’s matrix’ in which we can all find a place and rediscover ourselves.
His subject matter is varied including the gaze, childhood and its playthings, faces, desolation, empty cities, hauntings, colour, dance, delight, flowers, sexuality, humour, trees, leaves, birds, provocation and celebration. There are moments in these images of lasting import in which his discussion is as eloquent as the pictures themselves. At the end he proves the question he opens with—can he be both healer and artist? His life and work give testimony to how healing and creativity are different branches of the same tree.
Aldous Huxley (1943) wrote of a notional anthology in art works—‘unpublished’ he says—that he called The Anthology of Later Works. It includes books, music and painting whose mastery is gained, in part, by the authors’ closeness to the end of their days. We must now add to it the psychotherapist as painter—a masterpiece that Morris fell into through a pandemic that he survived, only to die of another illness on the publication of this book.
Morris’s partner of 43 years, Tony Fagin, died of an aortic aneurism just one month after him. The home they shared in north London—once a hearty meeting place for many, filled with art and with objects trouve, is now empty. They had suffered several painful losses that coloured their recent years including Morris’s older sister Shirley. Morris was deeply concerned about the only remaining member of his immediate family, his older brother Leon, who lives in St. Louis Missouri. Morris and Tony are survived by Morris’s nephew Martin and his four nieces—the son and daughters of Leon; by Selwyn, the son of his late sister; and by Tony’s two nephews, the sons of his sister.
Morris Nitsun’s legacy continues in paintings that celebrate the colour and delight of the pictorial world, in the hearts and minds of many who treasure the benefits his therapy brought them, and it will continue amongst those influenced by his teaching and the scope of his books, written to help bring sense to a troubled world.