Robin Skynner

Robin Skynner (16 August 1922—2000) was a wartime Royal Air Force (RAF) Mosquito twin engined bomber pilot and a psychiatric pioneer and innovator. He worked as a child psychiatrist, and he trained in Group Analysis to become a Group Analyst and a family therapist who employed group-analytic principles in that therapeutic modality. He was also a prolific writer. He was an important innovator and pioneer in the field of mental illness, and a gifted teacher and practitioner of psychotherapy with individuals, groups, families, couples and institutions.

Background

Born on 16 August 1922 at Charlestown, Cornwall, Skynner was the eldest of five boys. He was educated at St Austell County School and Blundells, after which, at the age of 18, he volunteered for the RAF and was selected as a prospective bomber pilot. He was adversely affected by the shared destruction and slaughter he was obliged to carry out, an experience that, for a variety of complex reasons, drew him to psychiatry as an eventual vocation.

To this end, after demobilisation, he enrolled as a student at University College Hospital and qualified MB, BS (Lond) in 1952. He then began his psychiatric training and in 1957 he passed the Diploma of Psychological Medicine, and then in 1971 he was elected MRCPsych, proceeding FRCPsych in 1976. He was successively the Director of the Woodberry Down Child Guidance Unit, Physician-in Charge of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for children, Senior Tutor in Psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychiatry and Honorary Associate Consultant at the Maudsley Hospital. But it was at the Maudsley where Skynner, owing undoubtedly to the influence of the distinguished émigré psychiatrist, Dr S. H. Foulkes, found his feet and began to shape his future.

Dr S.H. Foulkes, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, was the founder, with others, of group analysis in Britain, a group approach developed out of Foulkes's treatment of war victims in Northfield Hospital, Birmingham. Foulkes was a pioneer and quickly attracted the attention of others keen to change the way mental health patients were dealt with. Skynner was intrigued by Foulkes and by the early stages of the Therapeutic community movement, which was beginning to gather strength. He became Foulkes's pupil and later his patient in a group; Robin Skynner would readily admit he needed treatment himself.

Thus, in 1959, Skynner, together with fellow disciples of Dr Foulkes, founded the Group Analytic Practice which specialises in group, family and marital therapy. A logical development was the emergence of the Institute of Group Analysis for the specific purpose of giving training in group therapy. However, it was Skynner himself who in 1977 founded the Institute of Family Therapy and chaired it for the next 2 years.

He subsequently worked with adults and children of an unusually wide range of socio-economic status, from private practice to the poorest districts of the East End of London. His chief interest was the practice and teaching of psychotherapy, with individuals, groups, families, couples and institutions. The important posts he successfully filled were senior tutor (psychotherapy) at the Institute of Psychiatry, honorary assistant consultant psychiatrist at Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital and physician in charge of the Department of Psychiatry at Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, London. He was a founder of the Group-Analytic Practice and of the Institute of Group-Analysis, and a founder and first chairman of the Institute of Family Therapy, London.

Robin Skynner will be remembered for his prolific writing. He is the author of One Flesh: Separate Persons, Principles of Family and Marital Psychotherapy (1976), Explorations with Families: Group-Analysis and Family Therapy(1987), Institutes and How to Survive Them: Mental Health Training and Consultation (1989), Family Matters (1995), "Families and how to survive them" (1975), and "Life and how to survive it". The latter two books were co-written with the actor John Cleese of Fawlty Towers fame.

Robin Skynner married twice: the first in 1948 to Geraldine Foley was dissolved in 1959. That same year he married Prudence Fawcett, who died in 1987. Robin is buried alongside Prudence in Highgate cemetery London. He was survived by a son and a daughter of his marriage to Prudence.

Skynner's personal history and upbringing as well as his experience in child guidance which covered a wide range of children and adults from all strata of society, formulated in his mind the need for family therapy, the idea that the problem child carried something for the whole family and therefore the whole family needed to be involved in the treatment plan. He became immensely successful as a practitioner and much in demand.

References

Skynner, A. C. (1984). Group analysis and family therapy. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy; 34: 215-224.