Frank Lake

Frank Lake (6 June 1914 – 10 May 1982) was one of the pioneers of pastoral counselling in the United Kingdom. In 1962, he founded the Clinical Theology Association with the primary aim to make clergy more effective in understanding and accepting the psychological origins of their parishioners’ personal difficulties. However, the training seminars in pastoral counselling, which he began in 1958, eventually enlisted professional and lay people in various fields from various denominations. Many thousands of people attended the seminars.

Lake was born on 6 June 1914 in Aughton, Lancashire. His parents were committed Christians. His father, John Lake, was both a stockbroker in Liverpool and the organist and choirmaster in their parish. His mother, Mary, had trained as a teacher. Lake was the eldest of three sons.

Lake studied medicine at Edinburgh University, graduating with degrees in medicine and surgery in 1937. With missionary work in mind, he trained in parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and took up an appointment with the Church Mission Society to serve in India. During World War II he was recruited into the Indian Medical Service, from which he emerged with the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1945. His fiancée, Sylvia Smith, joined him in 1944 and they were married in Poona, where the eldest of their three children, David, was born. In 1946 Lake was posted to the parasitology department of the Vellore Medical Centre.

Lake changed directions from parasitology to psychiatry after he was appointed as superintendent of the Christian Medical College in Madras. When setting up a psychiatric unit there, he became concerned with ‘a variety of imponderable emotional factors which I had never been taught to think about seriously before’. In the early 1950s, he undertook retraining as a psychiatrist, first at The Lawn, Lincoln, then at Scalebor Park Hospital in Burley, Yorkshire. His allegiance was to the Object-relations school of psychoanalysis. He believed that the first trimester of embryonal development was the most important part of a person's life. He was encouraged by the exploration of prenatal and perinatal influences of Fodor, Peerbolte, Mott, Winnicott and Swartley. He was critical of Freud's about-face having first backed Rank's emphasis on the birth trauma.

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