My colleague and friend, the psychotherapist, author and campaigner Paul Gordon, has died aged 70. While eschewing the limelight, Paul was an influential figure and unique voice in the world of psychotherapy. His political commitment and determination to improve people’s lives led him to train as a psychotherapist at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies in London in the late 80s, and later at the Philadelphia Association, founded in 1965 by RD Laing and colleagues in order to challenge established ways of thinking about and responding to distress.
Paul became its chair, and was a strong advocate for the unique sanctuary and asylum their therapeutic homes have long offered to anyone in need. Indeed, facilitating access to low-cost or free therapy was important to Paul, who also worked with young people at North London’s Open Door, at Freedom from Torture, and helped to establish the Free Psychotherapy Network.
Born in Glasgow to Stanley Gordon, a businessman, and Wilma Donaldson, a speech and play therapist at Notre Dame Child Guidance Clinic, Paul attended St Aloysius college and then studied jurisprudence at Glasgow University. He graduated in 1974 and then worked at the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties, where he organised the first Scottish Conference on Children’s Rights in 1978, and took the case that ended corporal punishment in Scottish schools to the European court of human rights, ending the use of the dreaded tawse (leather belt). In 1980 he moved to London to work for the Runnymede Trust, where his prolific campaigning and writing focused mostly on racism, discrimination and social policy.
Among his later works, Paul chronicled the Philadelphia Association’s work in An Uneasy Dwelling (2010), building on a therapeutic vision he set out in Face to Face (1999). In possibly his most important book, The Hope of Therapy (2009), he compared good therapy to the qualities of a good friendship, urging: “A welcome, a hospitality, an attunement, an attentiveness, a suspension of self-interest … an engagement, a commitment to truthfulness, and a responsibility to the other.”
Critical of simplistic diagnosis and the tendency to medicate, Paul highlighted how adverse social conditions and challenging life events can create mental distress. As he wrote in the Guardian in 2011, “Behind every symptom and every appeal for medication is a story, and the silencing of those stories can be as much the cause of suffering as the details of the life.”
An admirer and colleague of the writers John Berger and Anne Michaels, he took account of literature and the arts in his thinking, and in 2010 co-curated an exhibition on the poet Paul Celan for the Southbank Centre, London. His final book, Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2012), paid tribute to the revolutionary writer who had greatly inspired him.
In his final decade, Paul suffered from a debilitating neurodegenerative illness. A consistent supporter of assisted dying, he chose to end his own life by stopping eating and drinking.
He is survived by his wife, the writer Melissa Benn, whom he met in 1986 and married in 2001, their daughters, Hannah and Sarah, and by his four siblings, Elizabeth, Nicholas, Alisdair and Peter.
