Having first come to France in her early twenties, Clark-Williams was subsequently analysed in the States by Raymond de Saussure; before returning to Paris after the second world war, studying psychology with Daniel Lagache, and finding (voluntary) work as a child therapist.
[1] A celebrated series of trial at the start of the fifties saw her right to practice therapeutically as a non-medic challenged in the French courts: after a first acquittal, she was on appeal fined a symbolic franc.
The police report states that she “uses childish means”: “she has a house or a tree drawn and if there is no line at the bottom, she says that the child lacks a foundation!.
[clarification needed] The Paris Psychoanalytic Society supported Margaret Clark-Williams, invited her to give a lecture and accepted her as a member in June 1950.
Although the ruling only related in her private, unsupervised practice of child therapy, Clark-Williams thereafter left France for England, with its more receptive stance towards lay analysis.