The writer Bernardine Bishop (obituary, 6 July) practised as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for nearly 30 years. She made an immense contribution to the clinical and scientific life of the London Centre for Psychotherapy, and supervised, analysed and taught generations of psychotherapists. Clinically gifted, she was passionately committed to her patients and the profession: she chaired committees with acuity and kindness, and an irrepressible sense of the absurd.
Five of her eight papers were published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. That on Othello makes evident her sense that the forces of the imagination at work in the critical appreciation of literature are central to a psychoanalytic understanding of the mind and its symbolic function. She felt that words such as truth, goodness, beauty, mystery, faith and forgiveness are now part of the analytic discourse, and was fully at home in these waters.
Her view of the internal world was unusually coherent and compelling, and she was able to articulate a picture of this world pulsing with identifiable life, resting on her moral and poetic imagination, and her highly developed theory of mind. Central to her thinking was the so-called "good object", its dynamic properties within the self, and its relation to the psychic forces which may lay siege to its goodness. In the case of Othello, she explained how he was unable to distinguish between an internal object that is good and one that is idealised, which made it impossible for him to see Desdemona's true goodness.
As in all her papers, using literature and particularly Shakespeare, Bernardine lays warm flesh on the dry bones of a difficult psychoanalytic concept such as projective identification. She also conceived and contributed to four books in the Practice of Psychotherapy series.
Thanks to her extraordinary capacity to communicate with wit and originality, and her ardent and loving nature, she made a mark on all who met her. Her unfailing generosity during a long and painful illness was an inspiration.