Rosemary Gordon

Rosemary Gordon
Born	(1918-Missing required parameter 1=month!-00)Missing required parameter 1=month! 1918 Germany
Died	17 January 2012(2012-01-17) (aged 93–94) Menerbes, France
Resting place	France
Known for	Contributions to Analytical Psychology, especially Dying and Creating, a Search for Meaning, 1978.
Scientific career
Fields	Anthropology, Clinical psychology, Analytical psychology
Institutions	Sorbonne University, University of London

Rosemary Gordon, (1918 Germany - 17 January 2012, Menerbes, France) was a naturalised British academic, clinical psychologist and leading analytical psychologist and writer. She was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Psychological Society.

After schooling in Switzerland, Gordon came to London where she took a degree in Psychology and later gained a Doctorate at the University of London. She undertook anthropological research into family constellations at the Sorbonne in Paris. On returning to England her work in Clinical psychology centred on Projective testing.

She became interested in the possibilities of Psychoanalysis and undertook an analysis with the Kleinian Hanna Segal. However she found its premises on instinctual drives too limiting and turned to Analytical Psychology instead. She became a member of the London Society of Analytical Psychology in 1957 of which she was later to become the chairman. She was for some years the editor of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and did not abandon entirely her interest in the British Independent School of Psychoanalysis, in particular the work of Melanie Klein and D.W. Winnicott. Aside from her many articles, she wrote two significant volumes, Dying and Creating, a Search for Meaning (1978) in which she explored the symbolic process and the variations she found in the conceptualisations of CG Jung and Sigmund Freud. Her last book was Bridges, Metaphor for Psychic Processes (1993), which gathered together the writings of a professional lifetime. She was an esteemed clinician, supervisor and lecturer both in Britain and abroad.

In 1950 Rosemary Gordon married the intelligence officer and later much lauded BBC producer, Peter Montagnon, and was then known as Rosemary Gordon‐Montagnon. They spent their retirement in rural Southern France where she predeceased him in 2012.

Bibliography

• Dying and Creating, a Search for Meaning (1978)
• Bridges, Metaphor for Psychic Processes (1993)