Abstract
Morris was both a friend and colleague and a restless spirit who I first met in 1990 when he presented his theory paper on the anti-group to a Monday scientific meeting in Daleham Gardens. He developed these ideas into a book on destructive forces in groups which has become a seminal text for group analysts.
He began his adult life in South Africa as an artist and continued this when training as a psychologist and later as a group analyst in the UK. He was one of the first gay men to be accepted as a trainee but, psychoanalytic theory still regarded homosexuality as an immaturity which Morris challenged in his own way and was a great support to others who followed him.
Born in Worcester, a small remote town in the Western Cape in 1943, he was the youngest of three children of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His father, Joseph Nitsun, was a businessman who lost family in the Holocaust and his mother, Bessie Joffie, a housewife, escaped the frozen wastes of Siberia where her family lived as political exiles. Morris went to King David School in Johannesburg and later studied psychology at Wits University where he obtained his PhD. He won the Artist of Fame and Promise Competition in 1966 and moved to the UK in 1968 to live in a bigger world away from the constraints of apartheid South Africa. He worked in the NHS for 50 years. In 1973 he became head of the Psychology Department at Goodmayes Hospital, Redbridge, and later was a consultant within the Camden and Islington Trust.
We met as colleagues and, later, co-group members when Amelie Noack and I set up a leaderless group for experienced colleagues who missed being in a therapy group. As the group analytic practice in Montague Mansions folded, members of this therapy group came together to set up The Fitzrovia Group Practice—which successfully continues to grow. They were Morris, together with Roberta Green, Bonnie Gold, Sarah Scott and Peter Wilson. Morris used his design skills, together with the hard work of his colleagues to transform a deserted building into a welcoming clinic.
About eight years ago Morris invited me to join him in a regular peer supervision and so we met fortnightly to talk about our clinical practice. I call him a restless spirit because his mind was always busy with the many projects he was developing. We always began with lunch, a personal catch-up and once the current preoccupations had been expressed, he was able to quieten the noise by concentrating either on my work or his. For Morris, concentrating on work or painting or writing or people was actually a more peaceful state as his mind was always managing ideas, loose ends, hurts and plans.
Morris loved his clinical work. Despite the ongoing desire to be an artist he was also passionate about helping people and really enjoyed the challenge of grappling with the endless knotty problems our work throws up. Once he agreed to work with someone clinically, he was extremely committed to them and always intrigued by the conundrum of an individual’s life. In fact his book on the importance of the group as an object of desire actually describes his own feelings. His groups in particular were a life-force for him and a constant reminder of the need to put boundaries around uncontainable seductive feelings. A supervisee of his recently said to me that Morris regarded himself as having deep maternal feelings and had told him that a group conductor should be loving and strong at the same time—not soft and flabby.
Although very interested in Kleinian theory, his approach was essentially relational, not interpretive. Thus he was ready to share his feelings with group members and able to say if he felt hurt or surprised. He was also open to trying different analytic approaches and supported patients who wished to try CBT or EMDR. He was not dogmatic but curious and open to what would work for different issues and people. This was also the approach we took in sharing our work so that understanding how our own unresolved issues may influence our responses or thoughts was an endless Aladdin’s cave!
He was a valued teacher and supervisor. He travelled widely, from Israel to the USA, from South Africa to Europe, being invited by group analytic institutes to share his ideas on the creative and destructive forces in our groups. His wish for dialogue wherever he taught meant that he rarely completed his lectures but demonstrated his approach with his wish to engage and learn from other people’s ideas.
We discussed the importance of friendship, especially the women who continued to connect him to South Africa, and his sisters here in the UK such as Pam Kleinot and others. He wrote several short stories grappling with the intimacy of his friendships together with an ongoing hurt about those friendships that were no longer. After his sister died he had very little family to whom he felt close, apart from his nephew who was her son. This meant that friendships really were his family of choice so that he kept up an extensive written communication with friends abroad as well as intense friendships here in the UK.
He worked hard painting during the Covid19 period and when presenting his work on The Deserted City actually said that this series helped him not to fear death. His ongoing anxiety about his health, and the ubiquity of death during that period, made him confront his fear. Morris suffered from a chronic lung condition, pulmonary fibrosis, which damages lung tissue. He did not want to die and had little space to consider it actually happening but he had thought about it.
In recent times we talked a lot about his history as his painting guided him, not only into facing death but also into understanding his relationships particularly with his mother. In fact, the paintings of the dancers reminded him of his childhood ambition to become a dancer. His recent work continued to surprise him as he felt that his paintings emerged, almost unguided, from a preoccupied inner world. Over the past four years, his ongoing wish to communicate and deepen this experience led him to hold a series of workshops and seminars where others resonated to his work. He was bringing together himself as an artist and a group analyst. This culminated in his final book, A Psychotherapist Paints, where he reflected on his life and his relationships through his paintings. It was a shock to us all as he died three weeks before the launch of this book which was to be held in a gallery together with his paintings. Death stole from Morris the public celebration of his life’s work. The gallery will be holding a retrospective of his work but he will not be there to experience how much he was valued. Up until the end he needed the reassurance of the mirror to reflect back to him what he meant to others as well as himself.
Morris and his partner Tony Fagin were together, travelling, fighting and loving for 43 years but Tony sadly died of an aortic aneurysm four weeks after Morris passed away.
He is survived by his brother Leon Nitsun, a niece and four nephews.
A complex friend who I miss deeply.
