My Psychoanalytic Story: with Mary Lister Ashby

Niamh: Tell us your name, where you’re based, and as much about your professional background as you’d like to share.

Mary: My name is Mary Lister Ashby. I’m now based in Yeovil. I will cease work with my patients this year, I gave them my notice two years ago and haven’t taken on anyone since 2019.

When I was 15, I knew I wanted to work with people, and I decided that mental health was the area that I wanted to work in. I was a cleaner in my summer holidays in the local psychiatric hospital, and I then went on to read a psychology degree at Bangor University. To be honest, it wasn’t at all what I expected and the bottleneck to get into clinical psychology was really narrow, so I stepped across and read an English degree. After that, I ended up working at Maudsley Hospital as a social work assistant, which was my first mental health role, and I never looked back after that. I think it’s essential for people training to have first-hand experience like that, I’ve always been so grateful for what I learned in that role.

My first training was at the Women’s Therapy Centre with Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum, which was fantastic. After that, I went on to do an introductory course at the Tavistock, a course designed for social workers. I continued to love Klein, but I actually took advice from my colleagues at St. George’s Hospital therapy unit, where I was attending meetings and later worked, and we discussed that my path should actually be Jungian. So, I started my training in 1985 at BAP as a Jungian, I loved doing that. It was my passion, and I had wonderful colleagues and teachers.

Whilst in London I was very involved on committees for the BAP, organising the seminars and such. I completed my full membership there in 1990. One of the things I enjoyed doing very much was setting up a series of dream workshops for practitioners, I would have academic input to start with from a visiting speaker and then we would explore one particular dream from patient work, I really enjoyed that.

Unfortunately, my first husband died in 1997. At the time, I’d actually started a PhD through the Open University researching a group of patients at St. Georges Hospital, but I had to stop that. We were also in the process of moving to the West Country at the time, so I moved there on my own in 1998 and that was a really tough time.

Niamh: That must’ve been a really difficult time personally and professionally, especially moving away on your own.

Mary: Yes, it was very challenging. Illness and death have probably been the key challenges throughout my career. There was my first husband’s illness and death, my own illnesses have really affected my life and career, and my second husband has endured a severe illness as well. Illness is really what prompted my decision to retire. I had it in my mind to work until I was 75 but 73 is close enough!

Niamh: Tell me a bit more about moving to the West Country on your own. How did you continue your career development during such a difficult time?

Mary: When I moved down to Dorset, having done social work and direct work with children, I was employed briefly to work with an organisation that offered therapy to children in care. I found that to be really raw work.

In 1998, I was working in two different consultancy positions loosely related to the Ministry of Defence and working with PTSD. I would advise people who had direct access to those suffering from PTSD, I was also seeing certain people for short-term work. Alongside all this, I was setting up my practice in Dorset. I rented a place for five years and invited people from the area to come and rent rooms because I didn’t know anybody clinically. By 2003, I was setting up my company, Colliton Street Psychotherapy Services, and alongside that, we set up a low-cost therapy and counselling scheme, which still runs in a different form today.

Having moved from London, I couldn’t really keep in touch with BAP, so I looked around and that’s when I became a member of Severnside and ultimately got involved with teaching again. I also taught at Wessex Counselling and Psychotherapy in Frome. I’ve always enjoyed teaching. As I’ve got older, I found that it was better to teach clinically than teach theory because my mind was getting tired of remembering, but that’s only really been in the last five years.

Once I had established my new practice in Dorset in 1999, I resumed more intensive work again alongside some consultancy work. Slightly madly, I went and took on a doctorate at Exeter university in my sixties and completed that in 2017. I’ve loved working with people, you learn so much from everybody.

Niamh: Let’s head back to the early days of your career. You highlight your social work experience as essential and something everyone should do in some form before training. What made it so essential to you and your professional journey?

Mary: Being in ward rounds, working in mental health, being able to recognise severe depression, recognise bipolar disorder, it’s invaluable. There have been times I don’t think GP’s have assessed patients properly and my experience gave me grounds to challenge them. It’s helped so much in my supervision work too.

Niamh: That practical work must be so valuable, to see it all in-person, playing out in front of you, I can imagine why that would be so formative.

Mary: I can remember my learning all the way back to my first social work case. When I think of the anxiety of being a training therapist, it’s very, very difficult. Working with the unconscious is a different ball game, it’s your whole mind and your whole being.

My senior colleague who ran our clinical seminars at the BAP, Susan Fischer, wrote Chapter 13 of Contemporary Jungian Clinical Practice called ‘Reflections on Retirement: Questions Raised’. She describes how invasive working as a therapist is to the system and how much you have to look after yourself and that is a big message. A piece of advice I always give is to avoid saying or assuming that you know exactly what’s going on, you’re always learning. The work is much more about allowing the not knowing. It still happens, I assure you, right up to retirement.

Niamh: On the topic of constant learning, was there a point in your journey where you began to feel confidence in what you were doing? Or has it always just been continual?

Mary: I think I remember somebody saying to me how confident I was in the early days, and I think I was, it all made sense to me somehow. But I think probably in latter days, I’ve had more periods of losing confidence. There’s also been periods of illness that I’ve experienced, where it’s important to not trust yourself so much and that’s scary because your system isn’t working as well for various reasons. So, I think a lack of confidence, you could argue, is something that’s necessary at times.

I’ve got a trainee at the moment, and I remember when she started, she was constantly saying,

“I don’t know. You know the answer, or the seminar leader knows the answer.” And that’s not always the case, it’s within one.

Niamh: I wanted to ask you about any professional challenges you’ve encountered over the years that you’ve learned from or overcome. Do any examples spring to mind?

Mary: I remember when my first husband was in hospital, and I was trying to do everything. I was quite alarmed when I was sitting with a patient thinking their problems didn’t match up to mine. That’s when I knew I had to stop for a while, which was really difficult. Then moving out of London after he passed was a big challenge. It was a really difficult time. I didn’t have children, so I didn’t have that kind of support around me, but I had fantastic friends and colleagues. To have to start all over again in a new place was really challenging but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind of what I wanted to continue doing once I was ready.

When I moved, I think I was one of the only BPC members in Dorset. There seemed to be an absence of people working in an intensive way. So, I had to adapt. Like, for a start, I had to adapt to the sort of people that were coming through the door, like shepherds, which weren’t the typical inner-city type I’d worked with in the past.

Niamh: A lot of your work seems quite focussed on community and accessibility to therapy, would you be able to speak more on that and what motivated you to work specifically in those areas?

Mary: It’s interesting you’ve picked up on the community theme because I missed out the fact that whilst working in the late 70s, I was involved in the strikes. I’ve always been a Labour Party member. When I retire, I’m on the Labour Party locally, I will carry on within the community to discuss issues, particularly around mental health.

There has always part of me that enjoyed creating something community focussed. I wasn’t the only one, there were like-minded people also creating low-cost and free initiatives in the profession. Michael Jacobs and Ruth Archer are a few names to mention. They were immensely valuable trustees for the Dorchester Trust for Counselling and Psychotherapy. I describe it like a garden. Lots of colleagues came and got established and grew to be fantastic practitioners.

Niamh: What are your reflections as you begin to wind down your practice? How do you feel about ceasing your work and what are your thoughts for those entering the psychoanalytic field now?

Mary: I’ve been very sad but I’m also very tired. I was very ill in 2020, and my husband was ill in 2021 and that’s what made me decide to wind down. I don’t want my patients to show up for a session one day to find me no longer there, I’ve heard it happen before. I mean, we’ve come a long way with protecting people from that, Severnside has been particularly brilliant with that.

When I look back at things, I don’t have any sense of regret, I definitely have a sense of fulfilment. At Severnside, it’s lovely to see people that I know and have taught take over roles within the organisation. The remit of who psychotherapy can help and how it is undertaken is widening somewhat as well which I think is a good thing.