About Irma Brenman Pick

Irma Brenman Pick is a Distinguished Fellow, Supervising and Training Analyst and former President of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

She has served on various committees, including being Chair of the Student Progress and Education Committees and of the International Psychoanalytical Association’s Committee on Psychoanalytic Education.  At the beginning of her professional development, Irmа  Brenman Pick had the opportunity to learn from Melanie Klein,    Wilfred Bion, and Herbert Rosenfeld. She is a psychoanalyst with a fine clinical intuition, coupled with a distinctive, lively and clear way of formulating from material.  Her    characteristic way of describing what is going on in an analytical process, using the language of ordinary human interaction, makes her formulations clear and readily accessible.

Irma Brenman Pick has published and presented a number of papers over the years. Her discussions of the complexities of adolescence in her book “Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter” (2018)    are rich in clinical details.  Her particular focus on countertransference allows for a deeper response to the patient’s real need to feel understood.   She often stresses the need to hold the patient with two hands; to acknowledge both vulnerability and destructiveness.

Key Publications:

1967  Pick, I. ‘On stealing: Clinical notes on three adolescent boys’. Journal of Child Psychotherapy; 

1985  Pick, I.B. ‘Breakdown in communication: On finding the child in the analysis of an adult;

1985  Pick, I.B. ‘Male sexuality: A clinical study of forces that impede development’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis;

1985 Pick, I.B. ‘Working through in the countertransference’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis;

1988  Pick, I.B. ‘Adolescence: its impact on patient and analyst’. International Review of Psychoanalysis;