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Nina Marion Blackett was born in London on 1 February 1900. Her father Arthur Stuart Blackett worked on the London stock exchange and her mother Caroline Maynard was an enthusiastic artist. Her brother was Nobel physicist Patrick Blackett.

She studied psychology and physiology at University College London and graduated in 1924 with a first class degree. After graduation she started work as an industrial psychologist. In 1927 she was invited by Prof. Elton Mayo to study with him in the US and observe the development of his Hawthorne experiment. After 2 years she returned to England and was occupied in industrial psychology until the birth of her son in 1932. From then until 1939 she worked for the Girls Public Day School Trust as a psychologist, researching the emotional problems that could influence girls at school. This led to her book ‘The Human Problem in Schools’ (1938).

At the age of 26, Milner had begun to record her thought streams in a diary in an attempt to discover a ‘central purpose in life’. In 1934, under the pseudonym Joanna Field, Milner published ‘A Life of One's Own’ (1934). This was the first of three books in which she shares the method and discoveries of her diary keeping. The discovery of her unconscious mind through this study was an immense surprise to Milner and it led her eventually to train as a psychoanalyst. In 1943, following analysis with Sylvia Payne, she qualified as an analyst in the British Society.

Also in 1943 she began an analysis of a psychotic patient which would last more than 20 years. Milner produced a uniquely detailed account of this analysis in her book ‘The Hands of the Living God’ (1969). She was also a talented artist and her book ‘On Not Being Able to Paint’ (1950) is an important work on creativity.

She wrote and published many other books and papers during her long career as a psychoanalyst and continued to see patients until her early 90s. She died on 29 May 1998.

Sylvia May Moore was born into a clergyman's family in Wimbledon, South London in 1880. She qualified from the London School of Medicine for Women (now the Royal Free Hospital) in 1906. In 1908 she married Jack Payne, a surgeon, with whom she had three sons. During the First World War she was Commandant and Medical Officer in charge of Torquay Red Cross Hospital which received wounded soldiers direct from the battle lines. She was awarded a CBE in 1918 for her services.

During the war she also became interested in psychoanalysis and began training with James Glover at the Brunswick Square Clinic in London. She later also underwent a short period of analysis with Hanns Sachs in Berlin, where she came to know Karl Abraham. Payne became an Associate Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1922 and a Member in 1924. She played an increasingly important role in the practice, advocacy and administration of psychoanalysis. She played a key role in the Controversial Discussions, becoming President of the Society from 1944 to 1947 and again from 1954 to 1956. She was also a fellow of the British Psychological Society and chairman of its Medical Section. She was elected an honorary member of the BPAS in 1962. She died in 1976.

Dinora Pines was born in Lutsk (now in Poland) on 30th December 1918. Her family were Jewish and moved to London when Dinora was 18 months old having fled the Russian revolution. Her parents were both doctors and her father was restricted to working as a general practitioner rather than in his specialism of ophthalmology.

Dinora Pines graduated from the University of London in French and German before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital, where she met Hilda Abraham. She worked in general practice and as a consultant dermatologist at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Hilda Abraham introduced her to psychoanalysis and she became interested in the psychosomatic aspects of skin disease.

She qualified as an Associate Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1962 and became a full member in 1966. She became a training analyst and supervisor in 1977 and Chairman of the Admissions Committee in 1983. In the 1960s she worked with Moses and Egle Laufer on a research project on promiscuous girls in the London borough of Brent. She became well known in the psychoanalytic community for her work 'A Woman's Unconscious Use of her Body' and globally for her work on survivors of the Holocaust.

She married Anthony Lewison, a lawyer and later archaeologist in 1947. They had 2 sons.

Dinora Pines died on 26th February 2002.

John Rickman was born into a Quaker family in Dorking, Surrey, on 10 Apr 1891. He studied at at the University of Cambridge and then moved to St Thomas' Hospital, where he graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1916.

His pacifism preventing him from enrolling in the army during the First World War, so he instead joined the Friends’ War Victims Relief Unit in Russia where he worked in the villages of Southern Russia. In Russia, Rickman met an American social worker, Lydia Cooper Lewis, whom he in married in 1918. They left Russia as the war ended and return to England via America.

After the war Rickman worked in at Fulbourn Mental Hospital near Cambridge. In Cambridge, he struck up a friendship with the psychologist W H Rivers, upon whose recommendation he decided to travel to Vienna where he began analysis with Freud in 1920. In the same year, following a recommendation by Freud, Rickman was elected Associate Member of the newly formed British Psychoanalytical Society in London. On his return he played a vital role in founding the Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1924 and the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis two years later. He remained very involved with the clinic and began to publish. In 1926, he produced the 'Index Psychoanalyticus', a bibliography of psychoanalytic papers published between 1893 and 1926. He also did editorial work for publications such as the 'British Journal of Medical Psychology' and the 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis'. In 1928, Rickman travelled to Budapest to undergo analysis with Sándor Ferenczi, returning in 1930.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Rickman joined Haymeads Hospital near Bishops Stortford as a psychiatrist and later transferred to Wharncliffe Emergency Medical Services where he began to collaborate with W R Bion. In 1942, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in order to transfer to work at a special military hospital for psycho-neurotics at Northfield near Birmingham. He also worked for the RAMC's War Office Selection Board.

At the end of the war he renewed his involvement in the Psychoanalytical Society and was elected President from 1947-1950. He died on 1 Jul 1951.

Little is known about Mrs Hannah Ries, although she appears to have been one of the many European psychoanalysts who emigrated to the UK prior to the Second World War, with the assistance of colleagues from the British Psychoanalytical Society. She was elected to associate membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1940 and to full membership in 1946. She moved to Los Angeles, USA, around 1964.

Her dates of birth and death are not known, but she was noted to be aged eighty or over in 1966 (minutes of the Council of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 7 Feb 1966) and her death was reported in the proceedings of a business meeting of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1975.

Joan Hodgson Verrall was born on 28 Jun 1883 into a family of Cambridge academics and in 1906 married a barrister, Evelyn Riviere, the son of the painter Briton Riviere.

Her interest in psychoanalysis emerged from meetings of the Society for Psychical Research organised by her uncle, A W Verrall, where she encountered the work of Sigmund Freud and read papers by Ernest Jones.

She had already studied the German language in Germany when she was seventeen and her diary shows that she had begun to translate Freud by 1919. In her twenties she suffered from mental and physical ill health and underwent an analysis with Ernest Jones from 1916-1921. She attended early meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society and at the Hague conference in 1920, she met Freud for the first time and asked to be analysed by him. She translated for the newly-created 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis', becoming its translation editor. In 1921 she joined Freud and his daughter Anna, Ernest Jones and James and Alix Strachey on the Glossary Committee, and worked with them to translate Freud's work, supervising the translation and editing volumes 1, 2 and 4 of the Collected Papers. She became Britain's first lay analyst and was later a key figure in the reception of Melanie Klein's ideas, taking an active role in the Controversial Discussions.

She had one daughter, Diana Briton Riviere. She died on 20 May 1962.

Herbert Alexander Rosenfeld was born in Nürnberg, Germany, on 2 Jul 1910. He qualified as a doctor in Munich in 1934 but, as a Jew, he was not allowed to practice in Germany and he emigrated to England in 1935. He re-qualified as a doctor in the UK and intended to practice general medicine but with limited opportunities available to foreign doctors, he applied to become a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. Later, he also worked at the Maudsley Hospital.

In 1942, he was accepted as a candidate at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and began a training analysis with Melanie Klein. He qualified in 1945 and soon became a training analyst. He worked mainly in private practice but also taught at the Institute of Psychoanalysis for more than 30 years.

His main interest was in the treatment of psychotics and his work was heavily influenced by that of Melanie Klein. Following on from Klein's famous paper, 'Note on some schizoid mechanisms' (1946), Rosenfeld published a case history called, 'Analysis of a schizophrenic state with depersonalisation' (1947). This made history as the first detailed account of a psychotic patient successfully treated by psychoanalysis alone. Although his work caused controversy among psychiatrists and non-Kleinian psychoanalysts, Rosenfeld developed a lasting international reputation. He was several times invited to North and South America, and gave lectures and seminars all over Europe.

In 1965, Rosenfeld published a collection of papers in a book called 'Psychotic States', which was translated into several languages. His further contributions to psychoanalysis focused mainly on problems of technique, psychosomatic conditions and borderline cases in general, and research into the destructive aspects of narcissism. At the time of his death on 29 Nov 1986, he was still working and teaching, as well as preparing to publish a further collection of papers on these topics. This book, 'Impasse and Interpretations into the Psychoanalytic Process', was published posthumously.