Anthony Storr, who died on March 17th aged 80, was Britain's most literate psychiatrist. A prolific author, journalist and radio and television commentator, he was widely respected as a fount of wisdom and good sense in his profession.
Born in London, Anthony Storr was a solitary, friendless child, plagued by frequent illness, including severe asthma and septicaemia, from which he nearly died. He was the youngest of four children, separated by 10 years from his closest sibling. His father, Vernon Faithfull Storr, sub-dean of Westminster Abbey, was 51 when he was born, and his mother, Katherine Cecilia Storr, was 44. They were first cousins, and their consanguinity probably accounted for his asthma, from which he, like two of his siblings, suffered for most of his life. He also seemed to have inherited from his mother a tendency to occasional episodes of depression.
Sent away to a boarding school at the age of eight and later to Winchester College, he was bitterly unhappy. Extremely slow to make friends, and showing little proficiency for games, he was bullied, and made only average academic progress.
What preserved his sanity and emotional equilibrium was a growing passion for music. From an early age, he attended performances in Westminster Abbey of such works as Bach's St Matthew Passion. At Winchester, he sang in the choir, played the viola in the orchestra and piano solos in concerts. Anthony Storr's decision to become a psychiatrist was made soon after he went to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1939, where he was encouraged by his moral tutor C.P. Snow. "He was the first person who made me feel I might be any good at anything."
After two years at Cambridge, Anthony Storr was given a wartime courtesy degree and continued his medical studies at Westminster Hospital (194144), where he won prizes for medicine and surgery. He gained membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1946.
His asthma precluded military service and, after a period as house physician at Runwell Hospital, he went to the Maudsley Hospital (1947-50), where he survived the ordeal of being Prof Aubrey Lewis's first senior registrar on his newly-formed professorial unit. Lewis, an obsessional polymath highly critical of his staff, undermined the confidence of everyone who worked for him.
"I owed Lewis one thing, at least. Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday morning conferences, no other public appearance, whether on radio, TV or the lecture platform, could hold any terrors for you."
He obtained a diploma in psychological medicine in 1951, and, developing an interest in analytical psychotherapy, went into analysis with Jung's English friend and colleague, Dr E.A. Bennet. He later became a member of the (Jungian) Society for Analytical Psychology.
His reputation as a writer and broadcaster began at the age of 40 with publication of his first book, The Integrity Of The Personality, in 1960. During the next six years, 11 other books followed, of which the most notable were The Dynamics Of Creation (1972), Jung (1973), The Art Of Psychotherapy (1979), Solitude (1989), Freud (1989), his favourite, Music And The Mind (1993), and Feet Of Clay (1996).
Anthony Storr's particular gift for rendering difficult concepts accessible, as well as his lucid, immensely readable style, made his books as appealing to lay people as to professionals.
Perhaps as a result of his own unhappiness, isolation and depression, his work revealed an abiding concern for those trapped in suffering. His need to penetrate the mysteries of deviant or violent behaviour was apparent in his books: Sexual Deviation (1964), Human Aggression (1968) and Human Destructiveness (1972).
At the same time, his understanding of human psychopathology gave him a rich appreciation of the creative possibilities inherent in mental suffering, and the powerful potential for self-healing to be found in artistic and intellectual creativity. This made him impatient with the medical model for psychiatry and its obsession with its symptomatic classification. "I want to show," he wrote, "that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place. The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner."
In 1974, he gave up private practice in favour of a teaching appointment at the Warneford Hospital, Oxford; a post he held until his retirement in 1984.
Anthony Storr was twice married, first to writer Catherine Cole, with whom he had three daughters before a divorce in 1970. They survive him, as does his second wife, Catherine Peters.
Charles Anthony Storr: born 1920; died, March 2001