Margaret Clark-Williams

Margaret Clark-Williams (1910-1975) was an American psychoanalyst, who worked as a lay analyst in both France and England.

Career

Having first come to France in her early twenties, Clark-Williams was subsequently analysed in the States by Raymond de Saussure; before returning to Paris after the second world war, studying psychology with Daniel Lagache, and finding (voluntary) work as a child therapist.

A celebrated series of trial at the start of the fifties saw her right to practice therapeutically as a non-medic challenged in the French courts: after a first acquittal, she was on appeal fined a symbolic franc. Although the ruling only related in her private, unsupervised practice of child therapy, Clark-Williams thereafter left France for England, with its more receptive stance towards lay analysis.