Lennox Thomas, 1952 – 2020 Our professional community is mourning
the loss of our dear friend and colleague Lennox Thomas. Born in Grenada, he joined his parents in the UK when he was seven years old. Initially, he lived in Nottingham and then moved to London where he studied and worked in social care as a qualifi ed psychiatric social worker and later as a probation offi cer before his renowned career in psychotherapy. In the early days, Lennox had hoped to return to the Caribbean to work but, due to the limited prospects of employment there at the time, he decided to remain in the UK. In 1983, along with a number of mental health professionals, he joined the late Jafar Kareem, the founder of Nafi syat, in establishing the delivery of the pioneering clinical practice of culturally sensitive psychotherapy. Later, with Roland Littlewood, he set up the fi rst successful intercultural psychotherapy MSc training in the country. After Jafar’s death, he remained Nafsiyat’s clinical director until 1999, when he joined the Refugee Therapy Centre and continued until his death to be fully committed, both as a clinician and a teacher, to the Racial and Gender Equality practice. His last public appearance, and despite his health problems, was on November 24 2019 at the Supporting Relationships and Families conference as a keynote speaker and co- founding member of the organisation. He has published extensively and has been an associate member of a number of professional institutions and a fellow of UKCP. I was lucky enough to have worked with Lennox both at Nafsiyat and the Refugee Therapy Centre and I have always remembered him being available to help and support his colleagues, always generous to share his knowledge, and it was always a joy to hear him speak at seminars and conferences. We miss you and thank you for your legacy Lennox. May you rest in peace.
Antony Sigalas, Nafsiyat I was the course organiser for the MSc
course in Intercultural Therapy at Nafsiyat and University College London mentioned by Antony in his tribute above and this is where I fi rst met Lennox as the successor of Jafar Kareem. At that time, there was much hope for the development of intercultural therapy, but the task of fi ghting for a designated
Context 169, June 2020
psychotherapy service was as much of a challenge as it is today. Lennox was a pioneer, one of the few black psychotherapists at the time who were able to make connections between psychoanalytic psychotherapy and race issues. This is what also made him a systemic thinker and practitioner. His thinking and the development of his ideas, aimed at demonstrating how accepted psychological processes can, under certain circumstances, be seen to apply to discriminatory practices in the therapy room. See for example his paper on the ‘proxy self’ and the way this may be understood in the relationship between white practitioners and black clients (Thomas, 1995). I recognised his resilience and tenacity, then, in his fi ght for black and minority colleagues in the fi eld and only later, when I myself became more closely involved in this struggle, did I understand the cost of this kind of commitment and the toll this might take, much more so on a black man than on a white woman. Our occasional meetings since he left Nafsiyat were always important and profound with a certain sense of having shared some
history. Lennox was generous and kind to me and, although I never asked him, I hope that he saw me as an ally. We shared a personal circumstance with the birth of his twins taking place at the same time as the birth of my youngest daughter and, for some years, we compared notes on being kept up at night, on childcare and child development generally. The last time I heard Lennox speak was at the AFT Brighton conference in 2016 and I was reminded of his understanding of how the detail of suff ering and discrimination can be brushed out by references to generalities. I will always remember Lennox for having reinforced the notion that fi ghting racism means fi ghting the small gestures and processes as well as the big ones.
Inga-Britt Krause, Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust
Reference Thomas, L. (1995) Psychotherapy in the context of race and culture: An intercultural psychotherapeutic approach. In: S. Fernando (ed.) Mental Health in a Multi-Ethnic Society: A Multi- disciplinary Handbook. London: Routledge.
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