My friend Arturo Varchevker, who has died aged 84, was a psychoanalyst who spent most of his working life as a couples and family therapist at the Marlborough Day hospital in London.
The pathbreaking service he provided gave help to highly disturbed families and made use of his imaginative ways of working in often near impossible situations. I well remember him telling me once about a patient who came regularly to play chess with him; it was only after very many games that the board was put aside and the patient began to talk.
Arturo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Mauricio, a businessman, and Lilka Mallerman, a housewife. He studied psychiatry at Buenos Aires University, where he was influenced by Enrique Pichon-Rivière and Marie Langer, pioneers in exploring the social and group aspects of psychoanalytic practice.
After qualifying as a medical doctor, Arturo studied social psychology and group psychotherapy with Pichon-Rivière at the Argentine Institute of Social Studies while working as a GP. He came to the UK in 1969 to escape from Argentina’s military dictatorship, and began training in psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London.
Given his strongly held leftwing values, it was important for Arturo to work in the NHS, and he joined the Marlborough Day hospital (later rebranded as the Marlborough Family Service) in 1972, working there as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist until his retirement in 2012. However, he also did private practice as a psychoanalyst and family therapist from the mid 1970s until 2019.
For more than 25 years Arturo was a member of the London-based Betty Joseph workshop, a group of psychoanalysts set up in 1962 by the great British psychoanalyst Betty Joseph to meet to discuss their work and developments in psychoanalytic technique. In 2004 he co-edited, with Edie Hargreaves, In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop, a book celebrating the work of the workshop, as well as Joseph’s life.
In 2000 he created the Psychoanalytic Forum, which, until its demise in 2015, facilitated conversations between psychoanalysts and the wider world. He chaired the forum, and the role led him to co-edit a series of three books that each dealt with ways to tackles different areas of human pain: trauma, psychic change and mourning. In addition he wrote Married Life and its Vicissitudes: a Therapeutic Approach (2019).
A man who liked to question convention, Arturo refused to take anything for granted. He was always at a slight angle to the world.
He is survived by his wife, Luiza Rangel, a Brazilian doctor whom he married in 1997, their son, Giuliano, and two daughters: Nina, from his first marriage to Renata Li Causi, which ended in divorce in 1982; and Francesca, from an earlier relationship with Silvana Pisa.
