In 1940 she and her younger sister Gill were evacuated to Cornwall, where they lived with their maternal grandmother and a nanny who, years before, had cared for Coltart's mother.
[1] Coltart attended Sherborne School for Girls and from there went to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English and Modern Languages.
Love, religion, grief, the psychoanalytic relationship, morality, culture, the silent patient, and the body—including that of the therapist, who sits all day — are some of the many areas she explored.
[3] Coltart was Director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis for ten years and Vice President of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Due to long hours of sitting for her work, plus years of heavy smoking, she developed a collapsed vertebra, giving her constant, severe pain.