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Lily Pincus

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Lily Pincus
Born13 March 1898
Karlovy Vary, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
Died22 October 1981(1981-10-22) (aged 83)
London, England
OccupationSocial worker, author, co-founder of the Family Discussion Bureau
CitizenshipBritish
SubjectMarriage, bereavement

Lily Pincus (née Lazarus, 13 March 1898 – 22 October 1981) was a German-British social worker, marital psychotherapist and author. She was a co-founder of the Family Discussion Bureau, which is now part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, and became a leading writer on marital stability and bereavement.

Early life

Pincus was born in 1898 in Karlovy Vary to a Jewish family. Her parents were Julius Jakob Lazarus and Ida Lazarus (née Weinfeld), and they had an arranged marriage in the 1890s. She had two brothers, Oskar and Max, and in 1903, her family moved to Berlin. From 1914 to the summer of 1916 she trained in scientific photography at the Lottehaus Museum in Wetzlar.

Marriage

In 1918 she met Fritz Pincus. They married on 1 June 1922 and moved to Glienicke, on the outskirts of Potsdam, in May 1925 with their friends Günther and Claire Loewenfeld. Pincus worked as a secretary and radiographer. Due to the lack of equipment to protect from radiation, Pincus became unable to conceive.

Life and career in Britain

On 2 February 1939, Pincus and her husband fled from Nazi Germany to Britain, settling in Harlech, Gwynedd, Wales. Her brothers and their families managed to escape and joined her in Harlech. In Wales, Pincus and her husband befriended the Welsh civil servant Thomas Jones. He offered them employment at Coleg Harlech, the adult educational institution that he had founded in 1927. In her later autobiography, she reflected on the soothing effect of the local scenery on refugees, the friendly and welcoming atmosphere in Harlech, daily life in a Welsh mining community and Welsh nationalism. After World War II ended, Pincas and her husband became British citizens.

In April 1943, Pincus and her husband moved to London. Despite having no formal social work training, Pincus was employed in Fulham as a social worker by the Charity Organisation Society, whilst her husband found work at the BBC. Pincus was described at this early stage of her social work career as "a quite exceptional, unobtrusive, but wise caseworker" with a talent for "glimpsing the human behind the hostile fact," by Enid Balint, who was then the manager of London's inner city Citizens Advice Bureau.

In 1946, Pincus, Balint and Alison Lyons founded the Family Discussion Bureau (later renamed the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute and now known as Tavistock Relationships within the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust). Pincus directed the Bureau until 1965, and continued working there until 1973. Pincus is credited with bringing a "social work ethos" to the institution. Pincus and her Tavistock colleagues developed the idea of "conjoint therapy," where two caseworkers were assigned to a married couple, and developed understandings of shared phantasies. They were part of the British post-war trend of treating marital stability as dependent upon the spouses’ psychological maturity and establishing equal-but-different gender roles between husband and wife. Pincus felt that in contrast to traditional societies with differentiated roles for the sexes within marriage, modern British couples were navigating the development of their masculinity and femininity without clear societal standards and were therefore experiencing sexual problems and marital failure. She also argued that when a couple had a child and the previously two person relationship changed dynamic, if the father could not allow a third person into the relationship they would be unable to care freely for the infant or provide support for the mother.

Pincus edited Marriage Studies in Emotional Conflict and Growth in 1960. Alongside her work on marriage, Pincus also advocated for intimacy with death and the dying, becoming a leading writer on bereavement and the importance of mourning. She wrote about the significance of the loss of a parent in childhood, discussing how for children "the loss of a parent rouses the need to progress, to mature, to be potent." Her husband suffered from lung cancer for many years before he died in 1963, and Pincus also drew on her personal experiences of his ill health and death in her writing. She was critical of old people's residential homes where there was lack of understanding and appreciation of each old person's individuality.

While living in England, Pincus converted to the Anglican Church of England.

Publications

Pincus published several books on the topics of marriage, family and bereavement, including The Marital Relationship as a Focus for Casework (1971), Death and the Family: The Importance of Mourning (1976), Secrets in the Family (1978, co-authored with Consultant Psychiatrist Christopher Dare), Life and Death (1978) and The Challenge of a Long Life (1981, with contributions by Aleda Erskine).

Shortly before her death, Pincus published her autobiography: Verloren – gewonnen: Mein Weg von Berlin nach London (1980, in German). Pincus' last writings were posthumously published in the journal Bereavement Care in 1984.

Death

She died in 1981 in London.

Legacy

James Fisher drew upon Pincus' publications and work at Tavistock in The Uninvited Guest: Emerging from Narcissism towards Marriage (1999).

References

  1. ^ "Our history". Tavistock and Portman. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  2. ^ Rubin, Abraham (30 November 2024), "Introduction: Conversion and the Problem of Persuasion", Conversion and Catastrophe in German-Jewish Émigré Autobiography, University of Toronto Press, pp. 1–18, doi:10.3138/9781487557355-003/html, ISBN 978-1-4875-5735-5, retrieved 14 January 2025
  3. Kaplan, Marion A. (3 March 2005). Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945. Oxford University Press. p. 198. ISBN 978-0-19-517164-8.
  4. Kahr, Brett (12 October 2023). Hidden Histories of British Psychoanalysis: From Freud's Death Bed to Laing's Missing Tooth. Karnac Books. p. 166. ISBN 978-1-80013-192-7.
  5. ^ "Pensioner Power". Catholic Herald Archive. Retrieved 15 January 2025.
  6. ^ Cohen, Deborah (9 January 2013). Family Secrets: The Things We Tried to Hide. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-0-14-195957-3.
  7. ^ "Lily Pincus (1898-1981) and Fritz Pincus". Accounts of Travel: Travel Writing by European Visitors to Wales, Bangor University. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  8. ^ Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2003). The CIA and American Democracy: Third Edition. Yale University Press. pp. vii–viii. ISBN 978-0-300-09948-5.
  9. "JONES, THOMAS (1870 - 1955), university professor, civil servant, administrator, author". Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  10. Kahr, Brett (31 March 2017). ""How to Cure Family Disturbance": Enid Balint and the Creation of Couple Psychoanalysis – Twenty-first Enid Balint Memorial Lecture 2016". Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. 7 (1): 1–25. doi:10.33212/cfp.v7n1.2017.1. ISSN 2044-4141.
  11. Kraemer, Sebastian; Waddell, Margot (30 September 2020). The Tavistock Century: 2020 Vision. Phoenix Publishing House. ISBN 978-1-912691-72-2.
  12. Nyberg, Viveka (2017). "Response to "How to Cure Family Disturbance": Enid Balint and the Creation of Couple Psychoanalysis, Twenty-first Enid Balint Memorial Lecture 2016, given by Professor Brett Kerr. Lily Pincus, Martin Buber and Project Identification". Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. 7 (1): 25–32.
  13. Scharff, David E.; Scharff, Jill Savege (1 May 2018). Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy: Foundations of Theory and Practice. Routledge. pp. 28–29. ISBN 978-0-429-91790-5.
  14. Chettiar, Teri (2015). "Treating marriage as "the sick entity": Gender, emotional life, and the psychology of marriage improvement in postwar Britain". History of Psychology. 18 (3): 270–282. doi:10.1037/a0039523. ISSN 1939-0610.
  15. Collins, Marcus (2006). Modern Love: Personal Relationships in Twentieth-century Britain. University of Delaware Press. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-87413-915-0.
  16. Llewelyn, Sue; Osborne, Kate (20 November 2024). Women's Lives. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-040-16585-0.
  17. Pocock, David F. (1 October 2010). "The point of death: A comparative anthropological approach". Contributions to Indian Sociology. 44 (3): 361–382. doi:10.1177/006996671004400306. ISSN 0069-9659.
  18. Moffat, Mary Jane (1982). In the Midst of Winter: Selections from the Literature of Mourning. Random House. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-394-52116-9.
  19. Shneidman, Edwin S. (1984). Death: Current Perspectives. Mayfield Publishing Company. p. 402. ISBN 978-0-87484-713-0.
  20. Prins, Herschel A. (2010). Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Reflections of a Forensic Practitioner. Waterside Press. p. 40. ISBN 978-1-904380-58-0.
  21. Wilson, Laura W. (1 November 1984). "Helping Adolescents Understand Death and Dying through Literature". English Journal. 73 (7): 78–82. doi:10.58680/ej198411879. ISSN 0013-8274.
  22. Tyrrell, Rosalie A. (1976). "Counselling a Child and Family Experiencing Parental Loss". Issues in Comprehensive Pediatric Nursing. 1 (4): 58–66. doi:10.3109/01460867609074911. ISSN 0146-0862.
  23. Simon, Clea (2 May 2008). Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads. Turner Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-470-33743-1.
  24. Post Mortem. The Listener Vol. 95. 1976. p. 124.
  25. Zipes, Jack (1980). Schultz, Hans Jürgen; Greffrath, Mathias; Broder, Henryk M.; Lang, Michel R. (eds.). "The Holocaust and the Vicissitudes of Jewish Identity". New German Critique (20): 155–176. doi:10.2307/487711. ISSN 0094-033X.
  26. Silverman, Phyllis R (Fall 1976). ""Death and the Family: The Importance of Mourning" by Lily Pincus (Book Review)". Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. 6 (3): 189 – via ProQuest.
  27. Day, Alice (1982). "Pincus, L. The Challenge of a Long Life (Book Review)". The Australian Journal of Social Issues. 17 (4) – via ProQuest.
  28. Redfern, Sally J. (1986). Nursing Elderly People. Churchill Livingstone. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-443-03084-0.
  29. ^ Pincus, Lily (1 June 1984). "PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT LILY PINCUS'S LAST WRITINGS". Bereavement Care. 3 (2): 15–18.
  30. Kahr, Brett (Spring 2014). "Can a Narcissist Ever Marry?: James Fisher and The Uninvited Guest". Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. 4 (1): 86–97.
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