Dear Colleagues,
It is with great sorrow that we have to inform you that Angela Connolly, past Vice-President of IAAP and a member of CIPA, passed away suddenly on the 8th of April 2020.
She served on the IAAP Executive Committee as Honorary Secretary from 2010 to 2013 in Joe Cambray’s administration. She was then elected as Vice-President of the IAAP from 2013 to 2016. I got to know her more during this period, when we were both Vice-Presidents.
I was very much impressed not only by Angela’s organizational skills and capacities, but also by her abilities as a clinician and researcher and by her cultural understanding. It was incredible how well she could understand the Japanese culture and mentality when I explained them to her. This might be why she was so successful and much loved in Eastern Europe and East Asia. It is a beautiful memory for me to have served as a translator for her seminar in Japan in 2015.
Her early death is a big loss for our IAAP community. We are immersed in deep grief. I can imagine that she had projects for the future as she was still young.
May her soul rest in peace.
Toshio Kawai, President of the IAAP
In memory of Angela Mary Connolly
It is with great sadness that I write about the death of a beloved colleague, Angela Mary Connolly. Angela was a remarkable, talented and inspiring woman. Her keen intelligence and warm heart shone and enlivened whatever topic or endeavor that called on her considerable energies, whether clinical work, theoretical formulations, teaching, analyzing, or supervising. She also had a true gift for administrative organization. Her powerful personality often challenged one to step up and meet the demands of the moment; when doing so she would always be there ready to engage and much fruitful innovative work could be accomplished.
I first meet Angela while serving on the IAAP Executive Committee and soon had the opportunity to travel with her to Bucharest, Romania for the purpose of interviewing and screening in the fledging Developing Group there. Her incisive grasp of the richness and complexities of the situation were key to the success of our mission. Subsequently, she graciously accepted my offer to take up the post of Honorary Secretary in my administration of the IAAP (2010-2013). In this she willingly and with enthusiasm moved into a demanding position, playing a key role within the Executive Committee. In this capacity, she was a brilliant collaborator who significantly contributed to the evolution of the Router Training program as well as to the successful passage of the revised constitution. Both projects required long hours of effort and thoughtful consideration with the shared goal of moving the organization forward into the future.
In the following years, we had the opportunity to companionably work together with the Developing Groups and Router Training programs in China. Again, her many substantial skills and long history of experience with groups from around the world proved invaluable in advancing analytic training in this region. Our last major excursion, where we attended and presented at “The 8th International Conference of Analytical Psychology and Chinese Culture,” followed by a journey on the Silk Road with a coterie of international colleagues remain for me a high point of cross cultural encounters, a genre of which she was so masterful. This unique adventure was, and continues to be a solace and source of joyful remembrance that we will continue to cherish.
Her passing diminishes the worldwide Jungian community; we have lost a unparalleled, creative soul from our midst. Nevertheless, Angela’s vital spirit lives on, threaded through the fabric of her many contributions. She leaves a many layered legacy that will continue to echo through our community as it is quietly passed on to future generations in the Jungian tradition.
Joe Cambray, Past-President of the IAAP
President/CEO, Pacifica Graduate Institute
A few words from Angiola Iapoce
With her extraordinary competence and knowledge, her clinical experience and her original, creative view on the issues she has been dealing with, Angela has always been an irreplaceable presence within CIPA. She possessed the rare gift of being kind without being condescendent, always ready to fight for her ideas whilst being extremely respectful of other opinions. She has always been highly passionate about her professional journey, bringing forward her work with a peculiar attention to all its cultural and clinical implications.
I had the huge privilege of sharing most of those issues with Angela, who was accustomed to engaging even in the most obscure and incomprehensible aspects of psychoanalysis, without surrendering to conformism being, as she was, always aware of the risks naturally inherent the analyst’s work.
With the proactive role she has always played as member of both CIPA and IAAP, Angela gave a substantial contribution to promoting and maintaining a strong bond between such Associations, constantly moving CIPA closer to IAAP and reinforcing IAAP’s role within CIPA.
Angela was a dearest friend of mine and, as such, I am incline to remember her bestowing to the word friendship the profound significance it embedded in the classic antiquity.
I am keen to share my grief with all the colleagues who have met, loved and esteemed her.
Farewell Angela, I will never forget you.
Angela Mary Dragosei, nee Connolly
Angela was born in Glasgow, the eldest of four children. Her father was a general practitioner and her mother a housewife.
Her family was Catholic, and she went to convent schools in Glasgow, and did her medical degree at the university of Glasgow. A year after graduation she moved to London to work as a trainee in Psychiatry, and she met her husband, Fabrizio, a journalist from Rome. They married a year later and soon after moved to Rome.
Angela was not qualified to work as a doctor in Italy, so she learned Italian, then she joined the medical course in Rome and repeated her final exams, allowing her to practise. She worked in Rome as a junior psychiatrist and embarked on her training as a Jungian analyst.
Her son, Patrick, was born in 1990.
She practised for twenty years in Italy, then when Fabrizio got a job as a foreign correspondent in Moscow the family moved to Russia. Angela studied the language but decided to have an English speaking practice. She soon became very active in promoting analytic training in Moscow.
She returned to Rome to allow her son to complete his education and once again was highly active as an analyst and trainer. Angela also served as the first European editor on the Journal of Analytical Psychology for many years.
Angela was diagnosed with acute leukaemia in early 2018. She was treated in Rome, and later in the north of Italy near her home in the mountains. Throughout her illness she was very positive and optimistic, despite fatigue and sometimes pain from the effect of the drugs on an old injury. She had hoped to have a bone marrow transplant which would have been curative if successful. Sadly, the illness progressed rapidly and she died in hospital on 8th April. Her husband, Fabrizio, and her son, Patrick, were allowed to be with her for the last few hours. The funeral will be private.
Pat Hughes, Psychoanalyst and Angela’s cousin