Our father, Lawrence Goldie, who has died aged 88, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He brought psychoanalytic principles to the treatment of cancer patients and his book Psychotherapy and the Treatment of Cancer Patients: Bearing Cancer in Mind (2005) has become a teaching text. In his wide range of work with people with critical physical illnesses, his interest was in understanding what was in the mind of these patients.
Lawrence was born in Manchester to Jewish immigrant parents from Russia and Romania. He went to school locally and began reading psychology at Manchester University, then volunteered for the RAF and trained as a pilot. After the second world war he decided to study medicine.
In 1948 he married our mother, Fay Jaffa, and six years later he took up the post of registrar at the Maudsley hospital in London, going on to train for the diploma of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry. He worked with Sir Denis Hill on innovative research on patients with "petit mal epilepsy" (absence seizures) that combined physiological observation with psychoanalytic techniques.
At the Maudsley, he began training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Tavistock Square, in central London. He was supervised by Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. Bion inspired much of his subsequent thinking about the approach to seriously ill patients. This underpinned Lawrence's later work, as he took the principles of psychoanalysis out of the consulting room and into the general hospital.
Lawrence became consultant psychiatrist at Queen Mary's hospital for children, Carshalton, in 1961. He then became senior lecturer at the Institute of Child Health at the Hammersmith hospital. There, he established a research department attached to the premature baby unit, recording neurophysiological changes in premature and newborn babies. He moved on to the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear hospital, where he was appointed as their first consultant psychiatrist/consultant medical psychotherapist.
The longest phase of Lawrence's career was at the Royal Marsden, where he worked from 1971 until 1988 as consultant psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He was the first to investigate the psychiatric and emotional needs of terminally ill people, and was a founder member of the International Psycho-Oncology Society.
Fay died in 1991. Lawrence is survived by his wife, Silvia Oclander, whom he married in 1993, and by us.