Coline E. Covington ’75

Coline, called “Kitty,” died of brain cancer on July 17, 2023, in London, the United Kingdom, where she had practiced as a Jungian analyst for more than 25 years.  She came to Princeton from The Chapin School in New York, her home city, and majored in politics. She was a member of Cap and Gown.

Following Princeton, Coline received a diploma in criminology from Cambridge University and then a doctorate in sociology from the London School of Economics.

Before training as a psychoanalyst, she worked as a consultant to local authority agencies throughout the UK to develop programs that prevented young offenders from being sent to prison. In conjunction with the Metropolitan Police, she set up the first victim-offender mediation project in the country.

Coline was former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council, the UK regulatory body for psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and was editor (1993–2000) of the Journal of Analytical Psychology. From 2011 to 2013 she was a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and a visiting research fellow in international politics and development at the Open University.       

Until her death Coline was a fellow of the International Dialogue Initiative, a think tank founded for politicians and psychoanalysts to work together to understand the effect of past trauma and large group anxieties on intransigent political conflict. She published several books on psychology, including Who’s to Blame: Collective Guilt on Trial, published shortly before her death.

We mourn the loss of this gifted classmate.

—The Class of 1975