Thomas Main


Thomas Forrest Main, known to friends as Tom Main was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who coined the term 'therapeutic community'.

Life

Thomas Main was born on 25 February 1911 in Johannesburg, where his father was a mine manager who had emigrated there from England. At the start of World War I his mother returned to English with Main and his two sisters, while his father joined the South African Army. Main was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne before studying medicine at Durham University, graduating in 1933 and becoming a doctor in 1938. Specializing in psychiatry, he gained a Diploma in Psychological Medicine from Dublin in 1936. In 1937 he married Agnes Mary McHaffie.
Main worked as superintendent at Gateshead Mental Hospital. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps as an adviser in psychiatry, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel and working at the Northfield Army Hospital for the treatment of war neuroses. After the war he went to Cassel Hospital, becoming Medical Director there in 1946 and working there for the next thirty years.
Training as a psychoanalyst under Michael Balint, he was supervised by Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Paula Heimann. He helped found the Institute of Psychosexual Medicine, and served as its Life President. He also served as vice-president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and was a co-editor of the British Journal of Medical Psychology. He died in Barnes, London on 29 May 1990, aged 79.
His papers are held in the Archive of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

Works