Obituary: Nina Farhi - The Jewish Chronicle

Pioneering psycho-analytic psychotherapist Nina Farhi did not start her career till her 40s, having lost her father when she was 19, writes Lawrence Joffe.

Growing up in modest circumstances, Nina Gould was one of four talented children of a civil servant, himself the son of Orthodox immigrants from Poland and Galicia.

From Copthall, then a grammar school in Hendon, north west London, she took various jobs and became assistant editor of the magazine Socialist Commentary. Her siblings entered teaching and dentistry but later concentrated on their artistic bent. Her mother’s sister, Clara Klinghoffer, was a well-known artist.

Her first marriage, to Norman Sievers, ended in divorce, leaving her with a three-year-old daughter, Rachel. She worked as a freelance editor and researcher, especially in psychotherapy, and taught English to foreign students.

In 1975 she returned to education as a mature student at Queen Mary College . Her first-class degree in 1978, the year she married the Turkish-Jewish author and academic, Musa (Moris) Farhi, enabled her to start a PhD thesis on her grandparents’ generation’s views and reactions to Britain, but ill health prevented its completion.

Bed-ridden for a year with the auto-immune disease lupus, she re-engaged with psychotherapy and decided to use it to help others.
After entering analysis and qualifying at the Guild of Psychotherapists, she served on the guild’s training board from 1989-99. She practised in the public and private sectors, and supervised staff at the Whittington Hospital’s psychiatric unit for long-term care of severely damaged people.

She used psychoanalysis, preferring a close if sometimes gruelling partnership with her clients to a rigid analyst-patient relationship.
Building on the pioneering work of London psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, who died in 1971, she co-founded the Squiggle Foundation in 1981 and was its second director from 1989-96.
Inspired by his concepts of play, creativity and finding the self, and by another friend and mentor, Marion Milner, who died in 1998, she investigated the emotional needs of adults and children and the impact of repressed urges on behaviour.

She developed the foundation’s constitution, membership and journal, adding courses for family care workers and others outside the strict ambit of psychotherapy. She lectured extensively in England and Israel and published in psychoanalytical journals in Britain, America, Europe and Israel.

Lively, analytical and intellectually rigorous, she was never dogmatic, drawing insights from science, art, poetry, drama, politics, international relations, and the kabbalistic concept of shards and sparks of holiness. Her essay, In The Beginning There Was Darkness — Images Across The Void (1997), powerfully describes the mystic drive to divine the limitlessness of human nature.

A lifelong member of the Labour Party, on the humanist wing, she wrote presciently against Holocaust denial in Patterns of Prejudice in 1981. She supported groups like Independent Jewish Voices and opposed Israel’s recent incursion into Gaza but backed the boycott of the United Nations anti-racism conference in April, knowing it would be used as a vehicle for antisemitism.

She worked to the end, helped by her husband as she shrugged off pain from her recurrent illness. She was preparing papers on perversion and anorexia when finally attacked by cancer.

She is survived by her husband, her daughter from her first marriage, and a granddaughter.