My husband, Michael Göpfert, who has died of cancer aged 77, was a consultant psychotherapist and child psychiatrist in Merseyside. In 1985 he set up a new psychotherapy service at the Royal Liverpool hospital, with integration at its heart, ensuring that therapists from different disciplines each had some training in another therapeutic method.
Michael saw that separating adult and child services when a parent had a severe mental illness meant that the effect on the children was often missed. He was an early proponent of this neglected area and edited the book Parental Psychiatric Disorder (1996). He worked closely with Barnardo’s Young Carers and its Keeping the Family in Mind service in Liverpool, now well established but innovative when it began. Michael also trained medical students in communication skills, supervised many psychiatric trainees and brought cognitive analytic therapy training to Merseyside. He was always prepared to take on difficult issues that others avoided.
Michael was born in Munich in the postwar years, the youngest of the four sons of Herbert Göpfert, a publisher, and his wife, Hildegard (nee Klaiber). As a teenager, he lived in the Bavarian Alps where he felt at home, climbing, walking, swimming, and playing the piano and the harpsichord. He wanted to be a pianist, but when he was 20, his mother died suddenly and he lost direction.
He went on to study nursing, then medicine, and became part of the political youth movement confronting the legacy of nazism. Alienated by the oppressive culture in Germany and attracted by the NHS and new developments in community psychiatry, in 1978 he moved to London for training.
He completed child psychiatry training in Toronto, where he also discovered the Canadian wilderness, kayaking and First Nations culture. He found that most adult psychiatrists did not even know if their patients had children, a finding repeated when he returned to the UK, and this sparked his interest in parental mental illness. He took up the post in Liverpool and made Merseyside his home, while also studying for a master’s in family therapy at the Tavistock Institute in London.
Michael had grown up not knowing anyone Jewish and with the Holocaust never talked about. He lived with the huge guilt that many young Germans felt at that time. At the Tavistock he met me, a child of German Jewish political refugees. We both came to understand more the position of the “other” and how victim and perpetrator roles could alternate. We married in 1989, and I moved to Merseyside to work as a child psychiatrist. There our three children were born.
Michael loved music, cycling, foraging and baking – after retirement in 2010 he set up a community bakery. He restored and developed all our family homes. In recent years we lived between Liverpool and north Wales; in Wales, Michael rediscovered some of what he had missed from Bavaria, and there, as a legacy project, he planted a field of truffle trees.
Michael is survived by his children, Anya, Max and Leo, his grandchildren, Aria and Luca, his brothers Dieter and Christian, and me.
