My friend Robert Young, who has died aged 83, was a psychotherapist, writer and academic, the author of influential books on Darwin, psychoanalysis and the history of ideas. A brave man of the left, he founded several journals of radical inquiry into science and psychoanalysis, and became a book publisher.
Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Bob was the son of Harold Young, who worked for a cotton filtering machinery company, and his wife, Suzanne (nee Jamison). At Highland Park high school and in the surrounding community, he rubbed shoulders with oil barons’ offspring, whose social attitudes repelled him.
Bob won a scholarship to Yale University to study philosophy, graduating in 1957. He started psychiatry training at University of Rochester Medical School in 1958 but left after his second year to accept a fellowship in 1960 to study history of medicine at King’s College, Cambridge. He took his PhD in 1964 and became a fellow of King’s and a lecturer in the history of biology. That same year Oxford University Press published his book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the 19th Century, which challenged the theory that human actions can be linked to specific brain sites. It remains a touchstone book in the literature.
In 1972 he became founding director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. He lectured and supervised doctoral research in history of biology, medicine, the human sciences and psychoanalysis there until 1976.
In the 1980s Bob launched Free Associations Journal and Radical Science Journal (now Science as Culture) and founded Free Associations Books, over which, not being a born businessman, he eventually lost control. He produced a superb ITV series, Crucible: Science in Society, but the experience was so disheartening it drove him into analysis, and that experience led him to undertake training himself as a Kleinian psychotherapist. In 1987 he became a member of the West London Psychotherapy Clinic, and saw clients at his home in Islington, north London, until recently.
In 1991 he returned to academia as visiting professor of psychoanalytic studies at the University of Kent before obtaining a full appointment at the University of Sheffield in 1994, retiring in 2000.
Bob’s volume Darwin’s Metaphor (1985), demonstrating that Darwin derived his theory largely from Victorian social ideas, shook up Darwin studies. Other books include Changing Perspectives in History of Science (coedited, 1973), Mental Space (1994), Oedipus Complex (2001) and The Guise of Solutions (2016).
His questing spirit inspired many. His humour and compassion leavened everything he did.
Bob married and divorced twice. He is survived by his partner, Susan Tilley, a son, David, from his marriage to Barbara Smith, two daughters, Sarah and Emma, from his marriage to Sheila Ernst, a son and a daughter, Nicholas and Anna, from his relationship with Margot Waddell, a daughter, Jessie, with Em Farrell, and by 14 grandchildren.
