he spotted his talents while he was training to work with adults as a psychoanalyst. In 1967, three years after he qualified, she offered him the post of psychiatrist-in-charge at her Hampstead clinic and training centre in child psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Then, in 1978, she asked him to succeed her as clinic director. Although by this time he had trained as a child psychoanalyst, he felt that he did not have enough experience working directly with children, and chose to share the directorship with Hansi Kennedy. They remained co-directors until 1987, seeing the clinic through Anna Freud's death in 1982, after which it was renamed the Anna Freud Centre. It was the foremost international centre for training to work psychoanalytically with children in the Freudian tradition, and Cliff developed an international reputation.

He belonged in the tradition, not just by training, but by temperament. To be a psychoanalyst, as Freud saw it, required more than a knowledge of science. Unless the psychoanalyst is at home with literature, the arts and mythology, for example, he or she will not be able to make sense of much that patients bring to their analysis. Cliff's library bore witness to his passion for literature, and he moved in a circle that included the legendary radio producer Donald McWhinnie and the poet Louis MacNiece. He was also a talented film-maker, a musician who played jazz piano and a skilled chess player. All this he brought to his work with patients and students and to his relationships with family, friends and colleagues. It was part of his humanity.

Cliff's understanding of Freud's metapsychology was second to none. His vignettes would bring to life its intricacies and their clinical importance. He always had time for those who sought to understand Freud, but he had little time for those who fudged basic differences between Freud and divergent theory and practice, whether they did so to avoid conflict or for reasons of politics or power. His forthrightness did not always endear him to colleagues, but he was respected for his clarity, erudition and unfailing commitment to scientific honesty.

There was more than a touch of the plain-speaking Yorkshireman in Cliff's dislike of intellectual sloppiness. Born into a steel-making family in Rotherham, he never lost his accent. His father was an accomplished painter and amateur pianist and he himself played piano, trumpet and saxophone. There were amateur theatricals too, with Cliff the resident dramatist and a tramcar in the garden as the theatre.

His film Look Back to the Future won an international award at the London International amateur film festival in 1971. The idea for it came from Freud's concept of "the compulsion to repeat", which is based on observations that, just as children love to hear the same story repeatedly, a great many people are inclined to repeat past experiences, though sometimes in a new guise, even when they are painful ones. It was followed by two further shorter psychological films, Now Listen (1974) and Meeting Point (1976) which were also well received. His compilation of Freud family films, made at Anna's request, can still be seen at the Freud museum in London.

Educated at Rotherham grammar school, he read medicine at King's College London. But in 1945 Cliff's studies were traumatically interrupted when he was invited to join a group of medical students, ostensibly to help tackle starvation in the Netherlands. In the event they ended up not in Holland but at Belsen. In his own words from his unfinished autobiography: "We found ourselves facing a scene so horrific it was beyond imagination." He rarely spoke of this experience, but perhaps it played its part in the background of his relationship with Anna Freud, whose own life had been so touched by Nazi persecution.

No sooner had he completed his medical training than his career was interrupted again, this time for national service, which he spent as a medical officer in the Royal Navy aboard an aircraft carrier. He then went on to specialise in psychiatry, training at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley hospital, south London. It was here that he first met Freud and another distinguished and influential analyst, Edward Glover.

After several posts, he was appointed to the London hospital as senior registrar. It was there that he met his wife Valerie, a senior registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology. Then came a post at the Cassel hospital, south west London, working with Tom Main, and training as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Psychoanalytic training requires that the candidate should themselves be analysed, and on Anna Freud's advice, he entered analysis with her colleague Ilse Hellman. He qualified in 1964, became a full member of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1967 and later became a training analyst. In 2003 he was given the rare distinction of being appointed to honorary membership.

The Hampstead clinic was a hive of research activity. Cliff worked closely with Anna on, for example, her concept of developmental lines, with Dorothy Burlingham in her work with blind children and with many others. With fellow psychiatrists Tom Freeman and Stanley Wiseberg, he established a group to study psychotic disturbances which both Anna and Dorothy attended. With Wiseberg and Pat Radford, he began research on heroin addiction. He would make significant contributions in all these fields as well as in family law, and wrote more than 80 scientific publications.

Though he had an early grounding in leftwing thinking, Cliff distrusted politics, but did contribute significantly to the administration of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He served as editor of the International Library of Psychoanalysis and custodian of the Standard Edition of Freud, which he planned to revise.

In his later years Cliff became pessimistic about the future of classical psychoanalysis, but he was always there for consultation, and despite illness and considerable pain, he never lost his sense of humour and mischief, his wonderful use of language, or his creative curiosity.

One development he was optimistic about was the confluence of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, particularly in the work of Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp and their co-workers. Freud had argued that at some point in the future, the relationship between the two disciplines would be greatly clarified. Cliff was delighted to see the beginnings of this in his own lifetime, especially in so far as they provide hard evidence for Freud's discoveries about the way the mind works and is structured. Some of his final publications are in this field.

In 2005 the Clifford Yorke prize was established in his honour for young researchers in the field of neuropsychoanalysis. Another development he supported was the formation of the Freudian Study Group, of which he was a founder member. He had been unable to attend meetings for some time, but in his absence he remained an important presence, as he will continue to be.

Cliff will be greatly missed by all who had the good fortune to know him. He is survived by Valerie and their two children, Rachel and John.