John Forrester obituary

The historian and philosopher John Forrester, who has died aged 66 after suffering from cancer, advanced the study of psychoanalysis, its history, key figures, clinical practice and social significance, both in Britain and farther afield. Based in the department of history and philosophy of science (HPS) at Cambridge University, this brilliant, deft and warm-hearted man brought boundless curiosity, unsurpassed stores of information and tough questioning to bear on Sigmund Freud’s talking cure and its place in the modern world.

From his PhD thesis, published as Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (1980) and immediately translated into French, to his magnum opus, Freud in Cambridge, completed but yet to be published, John was passionately engaged with his subject, though, being at heart a follower of the French Enlightenment, never a zealot. He continually enjoyed the conundrum that psychoanalysis – which he recognised had aspects of a faith or even a cult – presented to a sceptic of his rationalist temper. His life’s ambition, he explained to his daughter, Katrina, was to reconcile Freud, the doctor of the soul, with Michel Foucault, the critic of medical regimes of all kinds.

He brought a historian’s empirical mind to the task while practising the analytic method of watching out for inconsistencies and contradictions, through which the deepest meanings would emerge. His 1996 paper If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases examined, against a background of logic and classification that had developed since Aristotle, how “psychoanalytic discourse combines two unlikely features: it promises a new way of telling a life in the 20th century, a new form for the specific and unique facts that make that person’s life their life; and at the same time, it attempts to render that way of telling a life public, of making it scientific”. A collection of 20 years’ worth of further explorations along these lines, Thinking in Cases, is also due to appear.

John was also a highly effective catalyst: over the decades, he organised crucial interactions, seminars and reading groups, including a notable series in the 1970s when French practitioners came to England to meet and talk to luminaries in the humanities, such as the literary scholar Frank Kermode and the scholar of French literature and studies Malcolm Bowie.

Attracted to sensitive, difficult subjects: in 1986 he wrote a provocative essay on Rape, Seduction, and Psychoanalysis, and followed that with Truth Games: Lies, Money and Psychoanalysis (1997), a fascinating, slippery book about different ways of lying – to oneself and others. At the time of his death he was involved in research funded by the Wellcome Trust into a range of subjects including reproduction, IVF, surrogacy, genetic modification and gender assignment.

From 2007 to 2013, at a time of strain on academic values, he ran HPS adroitly and resiliently. In lectures as well as books, he was filled with a playful appetite for experience and knowledge, and was a gifted storyteller: an essay on the wary, prickly interactions of Freud and Einstein shows his acute insight into human character, while Freud’s Women (1992), written with his partner, the writer Lisa Appignanesi, displayed the couple’s exciting archival archaeology and flair for dramatic portraits, as they showed how a great man is sustained by family and friends, and unfolded the crucial role that female analysands, patrons, and Freud’s daughter and successor, Anna, played in his life and thought.

An imposing figure, even when he was young, John could appear scary, as it was clear he knew so much and thought so clearly. He had a domed head that made him, especially after chemotherapy, somewhat resemble a venerable oriental sage. He could be tenacious in argument, but his voice was unexpectedly gentle and confiding. Some political issues, among them the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, used to spark tense disagreements between him and some friends.

In a quiet, rather feline way, John could also be mischievous. At his inaugural lecture as professor at Cambridge, his 2002 account of Freud in Cambridge, he told us that Michael Ramsey (the future archbishop of Canterbury), aged six or so, announced “I am going to marry Mummy”. To which Ramsey’s elder brother, Frank, the future mathematician and logician, replied: “How can you be so silly, Michael? Don’t you know that you can’t marry your mother until she is a widow?”

Born and brought up in north London, John was the son of Reginald and his wife, Minnie (nee Chaytow), who had marched together to protest against Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists. A graduate of the LSE, after the second world war Reginald worked on the Marshall plan and became a senior international civil servant in the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (now the OECD). Later, he set up as an independent consultant. He died when John was 21. After taking a degree as a mature student at the Open University, Minnie became a social worker.

John went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s school in Elstree, Hertfordshire, and then on to King’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated in natural sciences (1970). A Fulbright scholarship took him to Princeton University and work with Thomas Kuhn, whose ideas spurred his approach to case studies.

He returned to King’s as a research fellow (1976-84), and then joined HPS as a lecturer. He was made a professor in 2000, since when his research students have spread around the world: they include Alison Winter, who wrote a seminal study of Mesmerism as her PhD thesis, and the psychoanalyst Darian Leader. Abroad, John held visiting posts in the US, Brazil, France, Italy and Germany, and spent a particularly productive and happy year in Paris in 1993-94. But his home was in north London with Lisa, whom he met in 1984 when, as deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, she invited him, presciently, to take part in a series about Desire. They married in 2013.

Later in life, he became marvellously affable and unequivocally life-loving: “John could draw the finest thread of silver from the most leaden of clouds,” said one friend. He was always full of shrewd observations and zest for a whole range of pleasures, from growing splendid dahlias and roses to competing at chess to a high level on his computer.

John bridged the distinction between the hedgehog and the fox explored by Isaiah Berlin, since there was nothing he did not know about his subject, but he was also curious about – and good at – almost everything else. His work changed the contours of a discipline and fertilised the thought of a scholarly and clinical community worldwide.

He is survived by Lisa, Katrina and his stepson, Josh.

John Forrester, historian, philosopher and writer, born 25 August 1949; died 24 November 2015

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