Augustus Charles Robin Skynner

Robin Skynner, wartime Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber pilot, psychiatric pioneer and innovator, child psychiatrist, family therapist and writer, died in October 2000, aged 78.

This most unusual and highly talented man was born on 16 August 1922 of local stock at Charleston, Cornwall. He was the eldest of five boys and Robin freely admits that he bitterly resented the advent of each and every sibling. So deep was the resentment that he claims it was at the root of an unhappy and rebellious childhood, as well as the cause of an embarrassing stammer.

He was educated at St Austell County School and Blundells, after which, at the age of 18, he volunteered for the RAF and was selected as a prospective bomber pilot. He was adversely affected by the shared destruction and slaughter he was obliged to carry out, an experience that, for a variety of complex reasons, drew him to psychiatry as an eventual vocation.

To this end, after demobilisation, he enrolled as a student at University College Hospital and qualified MB, BS (Lond) in 1952. As soon as possible he began his psychiatric training and in 1957 he passed the Diploma of Psychological Medicine, and then in 1971 he was elected MRCPsych, proceeding FRCPsych in 1976.

But it was at the Maudsley where Skynner, owing undoubtedly to the powerful influence of the distinguished émigrépsychiatrist, Dr S. H. Foulhes, found his feet and began to shape his future.

Thus, in 1959, Skynner, together with fellow disciples of their guru, Dr Foulhes, founded the Group Analytic Practice. A logical development was the emergence of the Institute of Group Analysis for the specific purpose of giving training in group therapy. However, it was Skynner himself who in 1977 founded the Institute of Family Therapy and chaired it for the next 2 years.

The important posts he successfully filled were senior tutor (psychotherapy) at the Institute of Psychiatry, honorary assistant consultant psychiatrist at Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital and physician in charge of the Department of Psychiatry at Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, London.

But, even if all else failed, Skynner will be remembered for his prolific writing, particularly for two of his books; Institutes and How to Survive Them (1989) and Families and How to Survive Them (1975). The latter was co-written with the actor John Cleese of Fawlty Towers fame and proved to be a blockbuster: it sold 353 000 copies and was translated into 10 languages.

Robin Skynner married twice: the first in 1948 to Geraldine Foley was dissolved in 1959. That same year he married Prudence Fawcett, who died in 1987. He leaves a son and a daughter of his second marriage.