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Your support makes all the difference.| Hans Zacharias Hoxter, social worker and educationist: born Frankfurt 3 March 1909; Founder and President, International Round Table for the Advancement of Counselling (later International Association for Counselling) 1966-98, Honorary Life President 1998-2002; Founder and Vice-President, British Association of Counselling 1972-2002; married 1946 Shirley Solomon (one son); died London 18 November 2002. |
It is largely thanks to Hans Hoxter that there exists the new and successful profession of counselling in Great Britain.
He was born in Frankfurt in 1909, the son of teachers whose pupils included the gifted therapist Erich Fromm, and educated in Germany and Paris. He later became attached to the League of Nations, especially concerned for the plight of refugees. As a German Jew, he himself had to flee abroad in 1933. The SS murdered his mother, and both his father and grandfather were tortured. In 1935, Hoxter established the Central Office for Refugees in London, a job which kept him busy throughout the Second World War.
Afterwards, as Britain began to rebuild, Hoxter trained in social work and primary education, working in east London. He was General Secretary for the Nursery School Association of the United Kingdom by day and received analytic therapy from Freud's pupil Ernest Jones in the evenings. Hoxter began to realise the fundamental importance of therapy in a war-grieving world – and noted its absence from the entire British educational system.
Hoxter's two main gifts were his belief that he could go and see anyone, however important their public position, and his ability to raise money from otherwise hard-headed organisations. He obtained funds from both the Fulbright and Gulbenkian foundations, and even persuaded the Department of Education to second civil servants to his grand project – the founding of counselling in Britain.
He had an amazing capacity to make people listen – including busy therapists like Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, who backed him. Hoxter helped organise the International Association of Vocational and Educational Guidance. Then, following a conference in Neuchâtel in Switzerland in 1966, he took part in setting up the International Round Table for the Advancement of Counselling. In 1998 this changed its name to the International Association for Counselling.
In 1970 Hoxter was instrumental in starting the UK Standing Conference for the Advancement of Counselling which became the British Association for Counselling in 1977 and the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) in 2000.
He worked constantly with Unesco, which in 1995 awarded him a Victor Hugo Gold Medal.
Gabrielle Syne and Phillip Hodson
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