Janet Hassan, child psychologist; born January 21, 1915, died April 14, 1998
JANET W M HASSAN, who died recently aged 83, was a teacher, psychologist, and child psychotherapist who played a key role in the post-war evolution of Scotland's childcare services.
She started her distinguished career in her native Govan, teaching at Harmony Row School, where she began to develop her life-long identification with a strong commitment to the many children and families who were up against it socially and economically. While at Harmony Row she completed her M Ed degree at Glasgow University.
She never ceased to remain sensitively in touch with the children, families, and professionals she worked with over the years. In the 1950s she was head teacher of Nerston School for maladjusted children near East Kilbride. This facility had previously been used as a short-stay home for disadvantaged children, then in wartime for children who had been unsettled by evacuation. Janet's tenure as head teacher involved developing a positive programme to help those who were not responding to routine attendance at the Glasgow child guidance clinics run by the education department.
With 35 to 40 children on the roll and very limited staffing, the throughput of cases was almost overwhelming. Over and above the management task of holding the place together as a working environment, Janet had regular therapeutic sessions with all the children. This sort of dual aspect of her approach to relationship problems was unusual at the time, and became one of the notable features of her life. The demanding daily pressure of life at Nerston, alongside her personal analysis and supervision sessions with Karl Abenheimer, surely laid the foundations for her therapeutic intervention in later years.
Janet was a founding member, with professor Fred Stone, of the first Department of Child Psychiatry in Glasgow at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. Following that she had a brief spell at the Scottish Office as a child inspector. She then took up a post as principal psychologist in the Scottish List D Schools Psychological Service, where she combined her skills as therapist, teacher, and trainer during a period of modernisation of practice in these schools. Janet Hassan taking on a group of headmasters on some contentious issues of child care was a joy to behold.
In the late 1960s, in Edinburgh, Janet was part of that small group of professionals who joined the late Dr Jock Sutherland, formerly director of the Tavistock Clinic, London, in founding the Scottish Institute of Human Relations. Among her contributions at the institute were her involvement in analytic group work and the training of psychodynamic counsellors.
In her chosen field Janet Hassan's intellectual and professional acumen were of the highest calibre, yet in her company one was always aware of her cultural roots and her skill at finding a language for the context in which she was currently concerned, which could express depth of meaning without losing clarity. She had an unusual gift of forcibly challenging ideas without creating offence. Her death has left a deep sense of loss in her numerous friends and former colleagues.
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