Well Action Psychotherapy

The renowned scientists in the queue, all immaculately manicured and dressed up in their best suits, were eyeing me suspiciously, as I stood with my 5 year old son in the middle of the sumptuous surroundings of Ashton Wold stately home.

Sporting my beaten-up biker jacket over a Hawaiian shirt I had taken the “informal” dress code literally, and my son’s waist-length blonde hair conspicuously contrasted with my wild grizzly beard.

A wizened old lady, eccentrically dressed in colourful robes, was sat in earnest conversation with the renowned professor at the head of the queue with a bored expression on her face. She turned momentarily and spotted my son, broke off her conversation and beckoned him over. He looked up at me and I grabbed his hand and walked over: “Miriam, I’m so glad to see you again, may I introduce my son …” She greeted him with a big grin and shook his hand, laughed when I asked her if her dogs knew what she was talking about, wished us both a “good bunfight”, then dismissed the tedious and now annoyed-looking professor and moved on to the next in the queue.

Although Miriam’s diligent PA gave me a good telling off for “jumping the queue”, I knew I had done her a favour, giving Miriam the opportunity to end the dull conversation with the obsequious professor who was doubtless looking for funding.

I spent the next 20 minutes explaining to my son that he had just shaken the hand of one of the world’s most accomplished zoologists (and also one of the UK’s wealthiest women), Dame Miriam Rothschild DBE FRS.

Rewind 10 years and I was down on my luck and needing a place to live. I had just explained to my prospective landlady, a Mrs. Lane, that I was a psychologist with an art practice, looking for a place with studio space and possibly even a consulting room. “You mean you’re an Art Therapist?” she demanded – an antagonistic and derisive tone to her voice (which I later discovered was her peculiar way of expressing excitement). I explained I was not, but that I did dream therapy and art and the two overlapped.

“Well that’s very interesting” she responded, “I have an exhibition of 6,000 paintings by schizophrenics touring the world at the moment. When would you like to move in? Obviously you don’t have any money so I’ll knock the rent down on the cottage as far as I can.” It wasn’t what I would have called a cottage, a 4 bedroom house with two enormous reception rooms and outbuildings and land, but I later understood that she would only use the word “house” to mean a stately home.

“But don’t you realise?” exclaimed my friend later that day, when I was sharing my news, “that’s Miriam Rothschild the world expert on fleas, and the paintings are the ‘Adamson Collection’!”

I knew of Edward Adamson, the chiropodist turned artist, the pioneer who brought Art Therapy to the UK; but I didn’t know of his connection to Miriam Rothschild, how she had supported him in establishing his clinics in gratitude for relieving the suffering of her beloved, but schizophrenic, sister, and how she was now custodian of the “Adamson Collection”.

It seems that something about me reminded her of Adamson, maybe it was my gentle manner or insatiable multidisciplinary curiosity, because Miriam treated me fondly for the 10 years we knew each other. I was repeatedly invited to parties at the beautiful Ashton Wold, and she often visited me at home to rest in the “empty room” after delivering a lecture at Oxford, always bringing a thoughtful little gift, usually a brace of pheasants.

It was on these occasions that we chatted about a mutual fascination: the crossover between science, art and spirituality, and her especial curiosity: telepathy in dogs. While Miriam bemoaned the impossibility of designing RCTs to test her theories (they would have involved inflicting severe suffering on dog owners) I argued wasn’t it enough to know for oneself that meaning is a subtle causal force in the universe, and that some supernatural world appeared to be on the side of those of us who want to make the world a better place?

Sadly, Miriam died in 2005 aged 96. She touched the lives of everybody she met with the combination of her incisive intellect and inexhaustible generosity.

She was a truly extraordinary woman, irreplaceable and sorely missed.

The two most valuable lessons I learned from Miriam are these:

1. The very best human beings always give everybody a chance
2. The very best scientists always keep an open mind on everything.