Professor Ian Craib

Trenchant sociologist cum psychoanalytic psychotherapist

Ian Craib, sociologist and psychotherapist: born London 12 December 1945; Lecturer in Sociology, Essex University 1973-94, Senior Lecturer 1994-95, Reader 1995-97, Professor 1997-2002; married 1990 Fiona Grant (one son by Mary Tomlinson); died Cambridge 22 December 2002.

Ian Craib straddled two fields which have had a difficult, sometimes fractious relationship, accompanied by notable failures in attempts at integration: sociology and psychoanalysis.

He was on the one hand a social theorist. His PhD thesis, published in 1976 as Existentialism and Sociology, was an assessment of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and demonstrated a form of humanist Marxism that remained influential in his subsequent thinking. He was also author of Modern Social Theory (1984), Classical Social Theory (1997) and Philosophy of Social Science (2001, with his colleague Ted Benton). These books grew directly out of his experience of teaching on sociological theory courses in the Sociology Department at Essex University, which he joined as a junior lecturer in 1973, and where he remained until his death, having been appointed Professor of Sociology in 1997.

On the other hand he was a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who practised within the NHS. After a period of upheaval in his personal life in the late 1970s, Craib underwent psychoanalysis before training as a group analytic therapist in the mid-1980s. My first encounter with him was when, as a young, rather homesick PhD student from Australia, I was referred on to his university group therapy. His way of running the groups was to minimise intervention, hoping to encourage the richness of transference that would draw us into full relationships with each other. Nobody, I have heard students say, could endure a silence like Ian Craib.

For Craib these two fields were in constant dialogue, in reality and in his writing. His university group therapy often contained students whom he also taught, meaning that we knew more about his personal life than therapeutic conventions normally approve. Far from attempting to exclude the reality of these external relationships, Craib worked with them, and typically took a belligerent attitude in his writing about it, taking psychotherapists to task for their attempts to pretend that the therapeutic relationship could be insulated from the external world.

Craib was diagnosed with cancer in 1993, first a brain tumour, and then, two years later, what was thought to be a primary cancer in the lungs. This experience undoubtedly influenced his personal and intellectual development in the next decade, when books seemed to fairly flow out of him, at a rate of one every couple of years. The Importance of Disappointment (1994) was completed in the wake of an operation to remove the first cancer. It set the tone for much of the work that followed, including an introductory textbook on psychoanalysis, a volume of essays entitled Experiencing Identity (1998), and numerous, trenchant critiques of aspects of sociological thought, delivered from the vantage point of the clinician and psychoanalytic thinker.

The Importance of Disappointment provided a pointed commentary on modern society and the tendency to eschew pain, ambivalence and difficult experiences in favour of a notion that we could somehow banish anxiety, and create identities of our choosing. For Craib the individual aspiration to freedom was important, but never achievable, and, in so far as change was possible, it could only be truly accomplished through full recognition of the ways in which unconscious desires resisted reform.

The book provided a commentary on modern attitudes to death. In place of mourning, bereavement counsellors provided "abstract guidelines" aimed at relieving, rather than confronting, the experience of guilt and the intensity of pain that surrounds death. This critique was extended to non-psychoanalytic therapies, which he criticised for false advertising, and for raising the stakes, encouraging us to believe that we could liberate ourselves from our pasts, as if "personal fulfilment" or "self-expression" were truly achievable. For Craib such tendencies amounted almost to a social evil, since "the links with other people, in all their dreadful complexity, are all that we have", and these were deliberately broken by creeds which diluted the fullness of human contact. Against such a tendency, Craib introduced ideas from psychoanalysis to assert the ambivalent and conflictual character of human nature.

The link between Craib's own cancer and the message of The Importance of Disappointment lay in his assertion that it was the fear of death that ultimately lay behind the denial of disappointment. He lived with the possibility of a short life after the cancer operations of the mid-1990s. He did this with exceptional bravery. He made it clear that he would talk to his colleagues about it, and that they were free to talk about it to him. He talked about the possibility of dying. For some of us this directness could be uncomfortable. It was certainly challenging.

Craib did not retreat, but if anything engaged ever more fully with life. He continued to teach, and participate fully in the department, until the week prior to his death. "How long does an academic book last?" he asked, two days before he died. "Ten, fifteen years at the most." What mattered more was the difference he hoped he had made to his students.

Michael Roper