A Life Dedicated to Psychotherapy, Thought and Human Understanding
It is with profound sadness that the European Association for Integrative Psychotherapy announces the passing of Dr Heward Wilkinson, former President and long-standing Vice-President of EAIP, who died on 28 August 2026.
Heward spent his final hours at Lancaster Hospital, in a city that held an important place in his intellectual journey. It was at Lancaster University that, many years earlier, he completed his MA in Religious Studies, studying under Professor Ninian Smart and writing his dissertation on Kant’s doctrine of time.
For the European Association for Integrative Psychotherapy, however, Heward was far more than the positions he held.
He was part of the history of our Association.
Over many years, Heward gave generously of his knowledge, his time and, above all, his thinking to the development of EAIP and to the wider European psychotherapy community. He served for many years as Vice-President of EAIP and subsequently as President in 2024, bringing to these roles the same intellectual independence, curiosity and commitment that characterised his professional life.
His presence at EAIP conferences, meetings and professional discussions was distinctive. Heward was someone for whom psychotherapy could never be reduced to a collection of techniques. He continually invited us to think more deeply about what psychotherapy is, about the nature of human experience, and about the philosophical, relational, artistic and cultural foundations of our work.
His professional and intellectual life crossed boundaries that are too often kept separate.
A psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer, scholar and author, Heward worked at the intersections of psychotherapy, philosophy, theology, literature and the arts. He was a UKCP-registered integrative psychotherapist and an Honorary Fellow of both UKCP and EAIP. He was also a founding editor of the International Journal of Psychotherapy, contributing for many years to the development of an international intellectual forum for psychotherapy.
Within the United Kingdom, Heward played an important role in the development of humanistic and integrative psychotherapy. He served several terms as Chair of the Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy College of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and was closely involved with the Scarborough Counselling & Psychotherapy Training Institute as trainer and founder-director.
His academic and intellectual journey was equally remarkable. His studies took him through English literature, theology, religious studies, philosophy and psychotherapy. From his early engagement with the work of F. R. Leavis at Cambridge to his studies with Ninian Smart at Lancaster, Heward developed a lifelong interest in the relationship between philosophy, literature, consciousness and human experience.
These different strands came together perhaps most clearly in his major work, The Muse as Therapist: A New Poetic Paradigm for Psychotherapy. In it, Heward challenged narrow or reductive understandings of psychotherapy and explored the possibility of understanding therapeutic work through a poetic as well as scientific paradigm. Poetry, philosophy, dreams, literature, developmental theory and psychotherapy could, in his thinking, illuminate one another.
This willingness to move between disciplines was not simply an academic characteristic. It expressed something fundamental about Heward’s understanding of psychotherapy itself: that the human person cannot adequately be understood from within a single theoretical language.
In this respect, his work embodied something deeply consonant with the spirit of integrative psychotherapy.
Integration, for Heward, was not merely the combination of techniques from different schools. It was an invitation to remain intellectually open—to hold different ways of knowing in dialogue and to resist reducing the complexity of human experience to a single explanatory system.
Those who knew Heward will remember not only the scholar, writer and psychotherapist, but the person behind the ideas: a colleague with an unmistakable intellectual presence, an independent mind, a willingness to question assumptions, and an enduring curiosity about psychotherapy and about life itself.
His contribution belongs to the history of EAIP, but it also extends far beyond organisational history. It lives in his writings, in the institutions and professional communities to which he contributed, in the therapists and trainees influenced by his teaching, and in the conversations and questions he leaves with us.
At EAIP, we will remember Heward with gratitude and affection. We honour his many years of service to our Association and his contribution to the development and intellectual richness of integrative psychotherapy in Europe.
His absence will be deeply felt at our meetings and conferences. Yet the questions he asked, the ideas he defended, and his insistence that psychotherapy remain open to philosophy, literature, creativity and the complexity of human existence will continue to accompany our field.
With gratitude for his life, his friendship and his contribution to our community, we remember Dr. Heward Wilkinson.
European Association for Integrative Psychotherapy (EAIP)
September 2026
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