Psychoanalyst and disciple of Melanie Klein whose work embodied a deep understanding of the mental life of patients
Betty Joseph was one of the leading Kleinian thinkers of her generation along with Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal.
She was born in Edgbaston in 1917, the daughter of an electrical engineer. Her family was from a Jewish community who had arrived in England from Alsace in the 18th century. She trained as a social worker in Birmingham and had an early attachment at the Canonbury Child Guidance Clinic in London run by a pioneer of psychodynamic child psychiatry, Emmanuel Miller, the father of the theatre and opera director Jonathan Miller. She then moved to Manchester because there