Mollie Mackenzie was Consultant Child Psychiatrist to, and Chairman of, the Department for Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic from 1968-1972. As I only got to know her well after her retirement, I have spoken to several of her colleagues — all perforce younger than she; Freda Martin, who succeeded her as Chairman in the Tavistock department, Dorothy Heard, Juliet Hopkins, Judith Trowell, Colin Murray Parkes and Richard Bowlby.

Dr Mackenzie trained as a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital, qualifying in 1930 with a distinction in obstetrics and gynaecology. She married in 1933 but continued to practise — which was unusual for women doctors at that time. After the usual house jobs, she entered single-handed general practice in Hatch End, Pinner. One of her junior paediatric posts was with Dr Donald Winnicott at Paddington Green Children's Hospital. He inspired her with an interest in the mental life of children, which was to remain with her for the whole of her life and shaped her career. During World War Two she kept the medical home fires burning, taking a special interest in mother and baby clinics as she reared her own son, born during the war.

When the war ended she sold her practice and went back to Paddington Green Hospital to work for Winnicott, who had moved from paediatrics to child psychiatry. She underwent a psychoanalytic training. Her analyst, Eva Rosenfeld, had herself been analysed by both Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein and on completion of her training Mollie joined the middle group of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. In those days one needed no formal higher qualifications to practise child psychiatry and she became a senior hospital medical officer (SHMO) in 1950 at the Tavistock Clinic. She was made a consultant there in 1966 when the SHMO grade was abolished.

Mollie was essentially a clinician. She loved, above all, the face to face contact with her young patients and their families, helping them sort out the problem and putting them on the road to recovery from their behavioural and emotional difficulties. She was also a sensitive and supportive supervisor, especially to those trainees with an independent turn of mind. Freda Martin recalls her as one of the strongest and most positive influences on her own development as a family therapist and community consultant.

Mollie was a contemporary colleague and close friend of the greatest child psychiatrist of his time, John Bowlby. She became an enthusiastic exponent of his insights into the nature of a child's tie to his/her mother — attachment theory. Bowlby had, for 22 years, been head of the Children and Parents' Department at the Tavistock Clinic and Mollie became Bowlby's deputy in 1957. At his 80th birthday celebrations in 1987, Bowlby paid generous tribute to the way Mollie freed him from clinical and administrative responsibilities to enable him to spend more time on research and writing. In 1968, on Bowlby's retirement, she was elected chairman of the Department for Children and Parents, a position she held until her own retirement in 1972. It wasn't easy taking over from such a charismatic and brilliant man, but she shouldered the task of holding together a difficult department, with its primadonnas, with her usual calmness and wisdom.

Bowlby's period was creative but stormy. Freda Martin summarised Mollie's special talents as follows: “She combined the deep insights into children's inner emotional life of a psychoanalyst with the broad common sense of a general practitioner. This was invaluable in a period characterised by deep divisions among psychoanalytic schools and distrust by many psychoanalysts of the new family and community psychiatry. She kept the department lines of communication open and provided a safe creative centre for staff and trainees alike. Thus she was able to support the department in thinking constructively about the direction they wished to go.”

All her colleagues with whom I spoke remembered her with affection and all of them recalled her tact and diplomacy, her natural wisdom and her toleration of different points of view (not a virtue commonly found at the Tavistock in those days!), she was a friendly and facilitating person who “kept a good ship running” (Judith Trowell). Dorothy Heard recalled the time in 1968 when she and Mollie went at short-notice to speak about Bowlby's work on ‘attachment’ at a conference in South Africa, during the apartheid era: “We were innocents in a political minefield!”

Mollie enjoyed teaching and consultation. Early on, she ran seminars and discussion groups for doctors and health visitors working in the maternity and child welfare service to help them understand the emotional development of children and the dynamics of family life, and published several papers on the subject. In 1970 she published a seminal paper with a psychiatric social work colleague, Paul Argles — a case study of crisis intervention in a multi-problem bereaved family, drawing on the work of Bowlby and of Gerald Caplan, a former Tavistock colleague, then at Harvard. It was very influential to a younger generation of child psychiatrists, myself included, who were just beginning to explore the new therapeutic techniques of family therapy, and crisis intervention — making a brief but effective intervention at a time of crisis in a family.

Mollie chaired a Tavistock coordinating committee for the training of child psychiatrists, child psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and psychiatric social workers until her retirement, and the committee also had the function of liaising with community mental health workers. She was a Founder Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1971 and was made a Fellow soon after. When she retired from full-time work she acted as consultant to Camden Social Services, a department on which she had a strong positive influence. She taught on the social work course at the Middlesex Polytechnic — now a university. After retirement she moved to Walberswick in Suffolk, where she contributed to the newly formed Suffolk branch of Cruse, the national charity for bereavement care, helping with the supervision of bereavement counsellors, teaching on the introductory course and in many other capacities until her health began to fail.

Her Tavistock retirement party took the form of a concert performed by the staff — music delighted Mollie, in her prime she was a good pianist. She was very touched that her work place recognised her other passion, one that was fully indulged after retirement by partaking of the rich musical life of Aldeburgh. She continued to take a keen interest in the development of child psychiatry and the evolution of the Tavistock Clinic into an academic institution with professorial departments — the first of these, in 1990, Mollie was delighted to learn was in child psychiatry. At her funeral her son, after pointing out how her family losses during the First World War had influenced her life-long professional interest in childhood bereavement and loss, said; “In her retirement she set a wonderful example of how to manage one's own old age. As waning capacities forced her to give up activities she always seemed to find new interests to replace old ones. When she gave up trying to keep abreast of child psychiatry she read avidly about the recent achievements of the geneticists. The arthritis forced her to give up playing the piano and… eventually bird watching…. But then she took up an Open University course in music…! When problems with her eyes meant that she could no longer cope with prolonged concentration on television… she still enjoyed talking to her friends, she attended discussion groups on current affairs, she played bridge and enjoyed being taken to concerts in her wheelchair.”

Mollie Mackenzie's professional life encompassed many of the important developments in our speciality — she was friends with many of the great figures who influenced the modern practice of child psychiatry and she, in turn, influenced many of the present senior figures in the speciality — but she remained a modest person who enjoyed living right up to the end, and took pleasure in her son's achievements and those of her friends.

She is survived by her only child, Malcolm, now a social work service manager in the Child and Families Service of Kensington and Chelsea Social Services.