Education
Born to Canadian psychologists Helen Bott and Edward Alexander Bott, Elizabeth Bott studied psychology at Toronto University and anthropology at Chicago University, where she gained her Master of Arts in 1949.
Born to Canadian psychologists Helen Bott and Edward Alexander Bott, Elizabeth Bott studied psychology at Toronto University and anthropology at Chicago University, where she gained her Master of Arts in 1949.
She then travelled to London to work in anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. In 1956, she began training analysis as a Kleinian psychoanalyst with Lois Munro. From 1988 to 1998, she was general editor of the Routledge series New Library of Psychoanalysis.
She has written several works of introduction to the work of Melanie Klein.
Often regarded as a member of the Manchester Group of anthropologists, her best-known work was Family and Social Network (1957), based on her 1956 Doctor of Philosophy with working-class families in East London, in which she formulated what was subsequently labelled the Bott Hypothesis: that the density of a husband and wife"s separate social networks was positively associated with marital role segregation. She became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1964, and a training and supervisory analyst in 1975.