Eric Miller Memorial Lecture 2022

In the Group Relations/Tavistock milieu Eric Miller comes as close to an icon as social scientists and psychoanalysts can tolerate… most of you will know him from his prolific writing and might have learnt, through his books, about his life-long concern with the paradox of being a human. Those of us fortunate to have known him personally, would recognise his many humanly contradictions.

A man of few spoken words, he had mastered the study of phenomena, and I believe touched people so deeply because of his ability to simply be with people without memory or desire in the fully Bionic sense.

Eric was my non-academic/second PhD supervisor, but he never wanted a copy of my completed thesis – he said, give it to me when it is published as a book – He wasn’t interested in things that were not disseminated to the wider society. Publishing, for Eric Miller, only had value if you could find it on the Karnac bookshelf or in Human Relations.

In this 20th anniversary of his death, this memorial lecture is a memoir of Eric, as I remember him from the many teas in the Khaleelee-Miller conservatory, when I came for supervision meetings, from Group Relations Conferences and – applying some poetic licence – from putting together pieces of others’ memories of him as they were willing to share them and his field notes as preserved in the Tavistock Institute’s archive at the Wellcome Library.

This year, the Eric Miller Memorial Lecture will be held both online and at the Tavistock Institute’s new premises in London. So, for those of you in far flung lands, you will still be able to attend the lecture on a virtual platform and for those of you who would like to come to London or are already based there, this will be an opportunity to meet face to face. This is therefore a ‘hybrid’ event, both online and in person. if you are intending to come in person, please complete your application as soon as possible, as ‘in person’ places are limited.