Graham Clarke obituary

By Ross Clarke • June 19, 2026 • Science

Other lives: Academic and author who specialised in the works of the psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn

Across his life my father, Graham Clarke, who has died aged 83, travelled on an intellectual journey that took him from the drawing boards of architecture and the mainframes of early computing to the theoretical rigours of psychoanalysis – and specifically to the object relations theory of Ronald Fairbairn, which became the centre of his life’s work. Where Freud had centred psychology on drives and instincts, Fairbairn placed relationships at the heart of human experience, and Graham was keen on showing why that distinction mattered, producing five books and 30 papers on psychoanalysis including, in 2014, the co-edited anthology Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition, which grew out of a conference on Fairbairn that he had co-organised at the Freud Museum that year. An ardent cinephile, Graham applied Fairbairn’s framework to films such as Memento, Spirited Away and The Singing Detective, and I was proud to have co-authored a book with him on cinema, Trump and the American Dream (2022). His first book appeared in 2006; his final one, An Introduction to Fairbairn’s Psychology of Dynamic Structure, in 2025. Born in Colchester, Essex, to Nora (nee Prior) and Phil Clarke, who latterly ran a pub together, Graham spent part of his childhood in Sydney, Australia, after his father had joined the merchant navy, before returning to Essex, where he attended Clacton County high school. He then studied architecture at the Bartlett School in London, gaining a BSc, before adding an MSc in computer science. Those years were shaped by the radical atmosphere of the 1960s: he attended the Anti-University of London, where RD Laing and others were dismantling the boundaries between institution and individual, and he demonstrated against the Vietnam war at Grosvenor Square in London. In 1986, having worked for a number of years as a systems analyst at various companies, including Mills & Allen and Marconi, he joined the University of Essex, becoming a visiting fellow there until his death. As a computer officer at the university he worked with colleagues on the Intelligent Buildings Project, inspired by Le Corbusier, exploring how emerging technologies and human psychology might together reshape the built environment. He also pursued studies at the Tavistock Institute in London, completing an MA in psychoanalytic theory there, and then did a PhD at Essex on Fairbairn’s object relations theory. A keen athlete who loved sport, he was a perpetual student who was happiest among friends and family, and never far from a good laugh. Deeply committed to CND and the anti-apartheid movement, it was through his activism that he encountered his second wife, Sandra Davies, a drama teacher whom he met in the early 80s and married in 2002. He is survived by two children, Zoë and me, from his first marriage to Jacky Beck, which ended in divorce, Sandra’s children from a previous relationship, Eleanor and James, and five grandchildren.

Source: The Guardian