Victoria Hamilton: a very special person

Victoria Hamilton (*1941)

Victoria Edith Hamilton, born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, was the youngest daughter of Robert Edward Archibald Udney-Hamilton, 11th Lord Belhaven and Stenton, and his wife Sheila de Hauteville Pearson. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and became an author and illustrator of children's books. Later she went to London, where she studied philosophy at the University College London and worked part time as an art-therapist in a mental hospital. In 1966 she met the anti-psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing and underwent analysis with him. In the beginning of the 1970s she received her training as a child psychotherapist with John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic. Victoria Hamilton worked for the National Health Service and various Child Guidance Services and taught at a number of schools and colleges.
In 1976 she married Nicholas Tufnell and moved with him to Los Angeles, where she opened a psychotherapeutic practice. Their son Samuel was born two years later. In 1991 Victoria Hamilton graduated in psychoanalysis from the University College London having accomplished an empirical study on Patterns of transference interpretation. Today she is supervisor and child analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Victoria Hamilton orients herself in the use of the concepts from attachment theory and object-relations theory. In her book Narcissus and Oedipus she takes up Greek myths again, which Sigmund Freud had used to illustrate his theory of the psychological development, completing them with later psychoanalytic research and relating them to her own experience with children.
In her book The Analyst's Preconscious (1996) she presents the results of her depth interviews with 65 analysts in Britain and the U. S., whom she questioned about the relationship between their theoretical positions and the exigencies of the practical conduct of analysis.

• WORKS
• Narcissus and Oedipus. The Children of Psychoanalysis. London u. a. 1982
• Grief and mourning in Tennyson's "In memoriam". Free Associations No. 7, 1986, 87-110
• Truth and reality in psychoanalytic discourse. IJP 74, 1993, 63-79
• The Analyst's Preconscious. Hillsdale 1996
• Foreword to Judith Edwards (Ed.): Being Alive. Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez. Hove, East Sussex; New York 2001, xiii-xxii
• (and John Bowlby) An ethological basis for psychoanalysis. In J. Reppen (ed.): Beyond Freud. A Study of Modern Psychoanalytic Theorists. Hillsdale, N.J. 1985, 1-28
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• REFERENCES + LINKS
• Itten, Theodor: From R. D. Laing to Jack Lee Rosenberg. In T. Itten and M. Fischer (eds): Jack Lee Rosenberg. Celebrating a Master Psychotherapist. St.Gallen 2002, 54-70
• Kurzweil, Edith: The Freudians. A Comparative Perspective. New Haven 1989
• Redler, Leon: Interview mit Victoria Hamilton (1971). Accounts of Kingsley Hall, the network, herself. Glasgow: Special Collection Dept. Univ. of Glasgow, R. D. Laing Collection, Call No. L192/1+192/2
• Spiegel, Rose: Narcissus and Oedipus, the Children of Psychoanalysis. Victoria Hamilton. J Am Acad Psychoanal 13, 1985, 269-272
• ThePeerage.com (2008-04-08)
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• PHOTO in Hamilton 1982 (cover)