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The Times, UK
Oct 17 2014
Jack Dominian: Psychiatrist whose study of marital breakdown
questioned Catholic sexual teaching and became a bestselling book
SECTION: OBITUARIES
The psychiatrist Jack Dominian was a man with a mission. Determined to
understand the increase of divorce in the Seventies, he conducted
studies that not only resulted in a bestselling book on marital
breakdown, but a re-evaluation of Catholic sexual teaching.
At a time when divorce was still taboo, he believed it ought not to
be; he helped couples through the dissolution of their marriages, yet
he also viewed their breakdown as a tragic event. He noted that 30 to
40 per cent of divorces occured in the first four years of marriage;
and he elaborated on the different stages of a couple's experience,
from courtship to the birth of a first child, which he identified as a
"crisis point", through to old age.
A religious man, he held conservative views on marriage for some
years. But he found that many of his clients at the Catholic Marriage
Advisory Council, where he was a consultant, had followed Catholic
sexual teaching and yet their marriages were falling apart.
Increasingly he came to reject the notion of marriage as a lawful
contract signed before God. In the modern world, he argued, it could
only be a relationship between loving partners.
Jacob Dominian, always known as Jack, was born in Athens in 1929 to an
Armenian Catholic father and a Greek Orthodox mother. With a large age
gap between him and his two older siblings, he often felt like an only
child. His struggle to avoid being smothered by his mother was at the
root of his lifelong interest in human relationships.
When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1941 the Dominians fled to India,
settling in Bombay, where young Jack learnt English, which he was
speaking fluently within a few weeks in an idiosyncratic accent and
idiom. Years later, while chairing a meeting in Britain which had
voted against one of the members, Dominian was heard to say: "His
chips are done!"
After the war they joined their extended family in Stamford,
Lincolnshire. Dominian attended the Lycée Léonin and studied medicine,
first at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, then at Exeter College,
Oxford. In 1955 he married Edith Smith, who came from a warm and
supportive family. Everything he knew about love and marriage, he
said, he learnt from her. They met through the Union of Catholic
Students while he was at Cambridge and she was a student at Newcastle
University. She helped him to research and type up his books; in their
spare time they engaged in animated discussions on poetry and music.
When she died in 2005 his world was a darker one. An inseparable
couple, they had four daughters: Suzanne works with autistic children,
Louise became a civil servant, Elise is a PA to medical consultants,
and Cate is a marketing editor; two of them are are married, one is
widowed, and one lives with her long-term partner.
Since his youth Dominian had wanted to become a psychiatrist, but the
Freudian school in particular was mistrusted by the Catholic Church.
"If you go into psychiatry, you will lose your faith," a priest once
told him. "If I don't I will lose my soul," Dominian replied. After
postgraduate work at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, he studied at
the Maudsley Hospital in London. He qualified in 1961, and from 1963
he was the Central Middlesex Hospital's first consultant psychiatrist.
The Marriage Research Centre was founded under his auspices in a
Portakabin in the hospital grounds. It began with a small group of
consultants each "putting £50 into the pot" towards research projects.
Shortly after retiring from the Central Middlesex Hospital in 1988,
Dominian presided over the centre's transformation into One Plus One,
now a leading charity that helps couples with their relationships.
In regular articles for The Tablet, Dominian offered a reconstruction
of Catholic teaching on sex and marriage. Having opposed Pope Paul
VI's reaffirmation in 1968 of the ban on contraception, he argued that
the presence of a genuine love between two people - whether they were
married or unmarried, gay or straight - validated sex. The home, he
said, was the "domestic church" where the gospel of love was lived
out; sex was a couple's recurrent prayer. The late Cardinal Hume, for
one, claimed that his outlook had been changed by listening to
Dominian.
His acclaimed book Marital Breakdown, published in 1968, was reprinted
17 times. He later published a study of depression, from which he
himself occasionally suffered severe bouts.
In 1994 he was appointed MBE for his services to marriage counselling.
Prone to self-examination, he identified his own personality type as
neurotic. "But then," he said, "neurotics can be fascinating to live
with."
Jack Dominian, MBE, psychiatrist, was born on August 25, 1929. He died
on August 11, 2014, aged 84
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article4240229.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_10_17
Oct 17 2014
Jack Dominian: Psychiatrist whose study of marital breakdown
questioned Catholic sexual teaching and became a bestselling book
SECTION: OBITUARIES
The psychiatrist Jack Dominian was a man with a mission. Determined to
understand the increase of divorce in the Seventies, he conducted
studies that not only resulted in a bestselling book on marital
breakdown, but a re-evaluation of Catholic sexual teaching.
At a time when divorce was still taboo, he believed it ought not to
be; he helped couples through the dissolution of their marriages, yet
he also viewed their breakdown as a tragic event. He noted that 30 to
40 per cent of divorces occured in the first four years of marriage;
and he elaborated on the different stages of a couple's experience,
from courtship to the birth of a first child, which he identified as a
"crisis point", through to old age.
A religious man, he held conservative views on marriage for some
years. But he found that many of his clients at the Catholic Marriage
Advisory Council, where he was a consultant, had followed Catholic
sexual teaching and yet their marriages were falling apart.
Increasingly he came to reject the notion of marriage as a lawful
contract signed before God. In the modern world, he argued, it could
only be a relationship between loving partners.
Jacob Dominian, always known as Jack, was born in Athens in 1929 to an
Armenian Catholic father and a Greek Orthodox mother. With a large age
gap between him and his two older siblings, he often felt like an only
child. His struggle to avoid being smothered by his mother was at the
root of his lifelong interest in human relationships.
When the Nazis invaded Greece in 1941 the Dominians fled to India,
settling in Bombay, where young Jack learnt English, which he was
speaking fluently within a few weeks in an idiosyncratic accent and
idiom. Years later, while chairing a meeting in Britain which had
voted against one of the members, Dominian was heard to say: "His
chips are done!"
After the war they joined their extended family in Stamford,
Lincolnshire. Dominian attended the Lycée Léonin and studied medicine,
first at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, then at Exeter College,
Oxford. In 1955 he married Edith Smith, who came from a warm and
supportive family. Everything he knew about love and marriage, he
said, he learnt from her. They met through the Union of Catholic
Students while he was at Cambridge and she was a student at Newcastle
University. She helped him to research and type up his books; in their
spare time they engaged in animated discussions on poetry and music.
When she died in 2005 his world was a darker one. An inseparable
couple, they had four daughters: Suzanne works with autistic children,
Louise became a civil servant, Elise is a PA to medical consultants,
and Cate is a marketing editor; two of them are are married, one is
widowed, and one lives with her long-term partner.
Since his youth Dominian had wanted to become a psychiatrist, but the
Freudian school in particular was mistrusted by the Catholic Church.
"If you go into psychiatry, you will lose your faith," a priest once
told him. "If I don't I will lose my soul," Dominian replied. After
postgraduate work at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, he studied at
the Maudsley Hospital in London. He qualified in 1961, and from 1963
he was the Central Middlesex Hospital's first consultant psychiatrist.
The Marriage Research Centre was founded under his auspices in a
Portakabin in the hospital grounds. It began with a small group of
consultants each "putting £50 into the pot" towards research projects.
Shortly after retiring from the Central Middlesex Hospital in 1988,
Dominian presided over the centre's transformation into One Plus One,
now a leading charity that helps couples with their relationships.
In regular articles for The Tablet, Dominian offered a reconstruction
of Catholic teaching on sex and marriage. Having opposed Pope Paul
VI's reaffirmation in 1968 of the ban on contraception, he argued that
the presence of a genuine love between two people - whether they were
married or unmarried, gay or straight - validated sex. The home, he
said, was the "domestic church" where the gospel of love was lived
out; sex was a couple's recurrent prayer. The late Cardinal Hume, for
one, claimed that his outlook had been changed by listening to
Dominian.
His acclaimed book Marital Breakdown, published in 1968, was reprinted
17 times. He later published a study of depression, from which he
himself occasionally suffered severe bouts.
In 1994 he was appointed MBE for his services to marriage counselling.
Prone to self-examination, he identified his own personality type as
neurotic. "But then," he said, "neurotics can be fascinating to live
with."
Jack Dominian, MBE, psychiatrist, was born on August 25, 1929. He died
on August 11, 2014, aged 84
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article4240229.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_10_17