Graham Clarke obituary

Across his life my father, Graham Clarke, who has died aged 83, travelled on an intellectual journey that took him from the drawing boards of architecture and the mainframes of early computing to the theoretical rigours of psychoanalysis – and specifically to the object relations theory of Ronald Fairbairn, which became the centre of his life’s work. Where Freud had centred psychology on drives and instincts, Fairbairn placed relationships at the heart of human experience, and Graham was keen on showing why that distinction mattered, producing five books and 30 papers on psychoanalysis including, in 2014, the co-edited anthology Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition, which grew out of a conference on Fairbairn that he had co-organised at the Freud Museum that year. An ardent cinephile, Graham applied Fairbairn’s framework to films such as Memento, Spirited Away and The Singing Detective, and I was proud to have co-authored a book with him on cinema, Trump and the American Dream (2022). His first book appeared in 2006; his final one, An Introduction to Fairbairn’s Psychology of Dynamic Structure, in 2025. Born in Colchester, Essex, to Nora (nee Prior) and Phil Clarke, who lat