Martha Harris

Martha Harris, née Dunlop (13 April 1919-November 1987) was a British Kleinian psychoanalyst of children and adults. From 1960 to 1980 she was head of the Child Psychotherapy service at the , taking over from Esther Bick, who had established a foundational method of disciplined infant observation. Harris was responsible for the subsequent expansion in the number of English and international trainees at the Tavistock, and for laterally developing the training into what became known as the Tavi Model. This model, in which infant observation continues to play a pre-eminent role, has been adopted, with modifications, in other European countries and in South America: such as the GERPEN in France, the six Martha Harris Study Centres in Italy, and the São Paulo Mother-Baby Study Centre in Brazil.

Martha Gemmell Dunlop was the eldest of four children born to Gabriel Dunlop, a farmer, and Margaret McLure, who had run her own tailoring company. She was born on her parent's farm at Beith, Ayrshire, though the family moved to Turner's Hill, Sussex when she was eight. She read English at University College London in 1939-1940, teaching in secondary schools for the remainder of World War II. She married Harry Thompson, a Forestry Commission ecologist, in 1941; they divorced in 1949. After the war she read Psychology at the University of Oxford. She taught in schools and at Froebel College before training as a psychologist at Guy's Hospital, then as a psychoanalyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society, where she was a training analyst. She had supervision with Melanie Klein,Wilfred Bion and Esther Bick, and personal analysis with Herbert Rosenfeld. At the Tavistock she introduced the Work Discussion Seminar, and the Personality Development Course. By contrast with the procedures of other trainings, she put in practice a principle of assisted self-selection for analytic candidates. The training model that was being developed at the Tavistock at that time was considered highly influential. An international conference in Harris’s honour was held in Paris in November 2010.

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