Abstract
It is with sadness that I find myself writing an obituary for my dear friend and colleague Dr Claire Bacha. She had just retired in January 2023 and we thought we could now see more of each other outside of our various roles within the IGA, Group Analysis North and the Power, Position and Privilege working group.
We first met briefly in the summer of 1987. Claire made a striking figure dressed in black coming towards me to introduce herself.
Although I knew of Claire and her colleagues’ success in setting up the IGA block training in Manchester, I did not encounter her again until the late 1980s/ early 1990s. We met as representatives of the Yorkshire Association of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Group Analysis North respectively, in competition for the IGA’s summer workshop. In the tradition of old cross Pennine rivalries, the situation became so heated we had to go to a reconciliation meeting after which the workshop alternated between Leeds and Manchester.
Despite this stormy start we went on to become work colleagues when she finished her training as a group analyst and came to work at the Women’s Counselling and Therapy Service in Leeds. She made the journey to Leeds from Manchester for over two years, such was her commitment to women only analytic groups. I was not yet a group analyst but a qualified individual and group psychotherapist and, in true Claire fashion, she made no issue of my supervising her work, no pulling rank. She valued the experience we had gained in Leeds and joined enthusiastically with our feminist ideals of making analytic work accessible to all women. In retrospect this was the beginning of a long working relationship and, later, a friendship.
What brought us together was our shared passion for group analysis and our advocacy for groups in their many different therapeutic and social settings. Claire continued with this commitment until very recently. For example, having joined her local Labour party about five or six years ago she became the education officer in order to promote dialogue in her branch about difficult issues including anti-Semitism, the importance of the group and impact of economic decisions on our lives. She was committed to dialogue and to exploring the interconnectedness of the political and the personal. This was the same sort of commitment that she brought to her work in the Power, Position and Privilege Working Group. Within PPP she was in a number of different groups including the Jewish and Palestinian groups, and she chaired the Students Lived Experience Group and the newly formed Rising Concerns Group until her illness led to her withdraw from these activities in March of this year.
In 2007 Claire was the first of the Manchester graduates to take on the role of training group analyst on the Manchester Course. Until that point the Manchester Course was led by a visiting team from London. I joined her in 2008 as training group analyst when the last member of the London team retired from Manchester. We worked together for 10 weekends a year for 13 years, and we were joined over the years by other colleagues as the course developed and grew. There were many changes during those years. We argued and discussed the merits of them but never fell out no matter how intense the discussions and our differences of opinion were.
Along the way I got to know about the many aspects of Claire’s life. Her birth in Chicago, her early life in California, her studies at Yale, she was one of the first few women to attend there, her move to Brazil in her early 20s, her marriage and divorce. She completed a masters in political science in Brazil.
In her late 20s she moved to Manchester where she continued to develop her academic work in economics and sociology and completed her PhD in Sociology titled The Emergence of Finance Capital in Brazil 1930s to 1970s at Manchester University.
It was in Manchester that she had her daughter Karin of whom she was extremely proud, and later enjoyed the arrival of her granddaughters Tiegan and Leila. When she completed her PhD she worked as a volunteer at MIND and, not surprisingly, she was involved in Workers Education groups all over the city while she worked in a workers collective bakery to support herself and her daughter.
Claire’s curiosity in so many aspects of life never ceased to impress me. She took up the harp about 10 years ago, joined a band and played in local pubs. She developed her interest in photography into a serious creative pursuit, producing many beautiful pieces of work. These were part of a more playful Claire who all those close to her enjoyed. At the same time, she was researching and writing her book on groups. This book The Group Dimension brings together her commitment to the power of the group and how this connects with politics and economics. She managed to complete her book a few weeks before her unexpected death on 13th May 2023. She was greatly reassured that colleagues and former students are committed to seeing the book through to publication.
I could go on at length about her many contributions to group analysis and her impact upon her many students, group members, and colleagues. She contributed to the theory of group analysis in her many papers. She was never one to shy away from engaging in a vigorous argument (evidenced in the March 2023 volume of Group Analysis). She was always encouraging of new writers in the difficult work of challenging the status quo on issues related to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and diversity within the IGA.
She was tenacious in pursuing a point, agreeing to disagree, and sometimes taking a small pleasure when she was eventually proved right. In all our years of working together no matter how vigorously we disagreed we could come together to enjoy dinner with our course colleagues on the Saturday evening of the block weekend.
Covid was a difficult time for Claire and for her involvement with the course. She became aware of her vulnerability, and she never returned to face-to-face work. It prompted her retirement from the course in July 2021 as we were due to return to in- person work in the Autumn of that year. We were pleased she could attend the graduation in July 2022 where we could express our gratitude to her for her commitment to the development of group analysis in Manchester and the North. She also contributed through her committee work to the development of the IGA and to keeping an open dialogue between London and the regions.
Along with other graduates of the block trainings I will be forever grateful for her tenacity in opposing the discrimination within the IGA towards those who had not completed a twice weekly London training. With the support of others, and with the bit between her teeth, she went to London to insist on a proper dialogue about the issue and the need for parity between the two trainings. This was in the very early days of the Manchester Course. The success in the recognition of the training’s equal value and place in the national IGA training programme has been formative in its foundation matrix and the development of the matrix of the IGA.
After Claire’s funeral, where I learned much more about her early life, I received a card from a course graduate who encountered Claire and I as part of the staff team in the two large groups held each weekend of the course for the duration of their training. They remembered Claire and I coming together over the Leonard Cohen song lyric. ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’ seems to represent her capacity to both see the cracks wherever they appeared and rather than fill them in she used them to bring in some light, no matter how difficult that process was. She brought light, sometimes heat to many of the settings and issues she was engaged with, something I am sure many others, will remember and be grateful for.