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Lily Pincus

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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.

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). 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 Lettehaus 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. From 1931, Pincus worked as a secretary.

Life and career in Britain

In 2 February 1939, Pincus and her husband fled from Nazi Germany to Britain, settling in Harlech, Gwynedd, Wales. In Wales, the couple 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 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, Baliant 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. They were also 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.

Alongside her work at the Family Discussion Bureau, Pincus edited Marriage Studies in Emotional Conflict and Growth in 1960.

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 Christopher Dare), Life and Death (1978) and The Challenge of a Long Life (1981, with contributions by Aleda Erskine).

Death

Shortly before her death, Pincus published her autobiography: Verloren – gewonnen: Mein Weg von Berlin nach London (1980). She died in 1981 in London.

Legacy

Pincus' last writings were posthumously published in the journal Bereavement Care in 1984.

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

References

  1. Röder, Werner; Strauss, Herbert A. eds. (2016) Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933–1945 (International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Émigrés 1933–1945). (in German). New York: Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration. ISBN 978-3-11-096854-5.
  2. ^ "Our history". Tavistock and Portman. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  3. 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
  4. ^ Cohen, Deborah (9 January 2013). Family Secrets: The Things We Tried to Hide. Penguin UK. ISBN 978-0-14-195957-3.
  5. ^ "Lily Pincus (1898-1981) and Fritz Pincus". Accounts of Travel: Travel Writing by European Visitors to Wales, Bangor University. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  6. ^ Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri (2003). The CIA and American Democracy: Third Edition. Yale University Press. pp. vii–viii. ISBN 978-0-300-09948-5.
  7. "JONES, THOMAS (1870 - 1955), university professor, civil servant, administrator, author". Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  8. 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.
  9. Kraemer, Sebastian; Waddell, Margot (30 September 2020). The Tavistock Century: 2020 Vision. Phoenix Publishing House. ISBN 978-1-912691-72-2.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Collins, Marcus (2006). Modern Love: Personal Relationships in Twentieth-century Britain. University of Delaware Press. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-87413-915-0.
  13. 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.
  14. Day, Alice (1982). "Pincus, L. The Challenge of a Long Life (Book Review)". The Australian Journal of Social Issues. 17 (4).
  15. ^ Pincus, Lily (1 June 1984). "PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT LILY PINCUS'S LAST WRITINGS". Bereavement Care. 3 (2): 15–18.
  16. 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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