Erna Wright (1923–2004)

Erna Wright, who has died aged 80, was a charismatic personality and an inspired teacher who, in the early 1960s, introduced the Lamaze method of training for childbirth into Britain.

Her classes were unforgettable. She never promised a pain-free birth, but what she did promise was that the women she trained would know what to do at each stage of labour. This was based firstly on an understanding of what the process of labour entailed - anatomically and emotionally - and, secondly, on a mastery of four different levels of breathing, and when and how to use them. And fathers learned these, too.

Erna found inspiration in the work of Grantly Dick Read, the author of Childbirth Without Fear (1933), but she felt that the book lacked a sound base for practical training. So, in 1960, she went to Paris to train with Dr Pierre Vellay, a follower of Dr Fernand Lamaze, who, in 1951, had visited the Soviet Union, where doctors had demonstrated their method of psychoprophylactic childbirth.

On her return to London, Erna started using what she had learned with groups of mothers. The results caused a stir among doctors, midwives and pregnant women, and Erna became a catalyst for the development of natural childbirth in this country through the National Childbirth Trust, which had been founded in the late 1950s.

Within a few years, she was receiving letters from thousands of grateful mothers. She provided, in her own words, "a valuable means of remaining on top of their own experience". As one mother put it, "the pain never overwhelmed me".

Erna's book The New Childbirth (1964) described the training in precise detail, and enabled many who could not attend classes to follow the training for themselves. It was, wrote the obstetrician Elliot Philipp in his foreword, "a notable advance in English midwifery".

Erna was the elder of the two daughters of a senior Austrian-Jewish civil servant, Robert Breuer, and his wife, who came from a Hungarian landowning family. The family lived in Baden, near Vienna, and Sigmund Freud was a family friend; indeed, Freud's colleague, Josef Breuer, was Erna's great-uncle, and she remembered visits where she sat on the knee of "Uncle Siggy".

After the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1938, the family were forced to move from their home into a small apartment in Vienna. Erna, then 15, sensed the imminent danger, and tried to persuade her family to leave. She failed, and set off by herself for Britain, leaving behind her parents and younger sister. After the war, she learned that all three had died in a concentration camp.

Alone in Britain, Erna found work and a home on a chicken farm in Buckinghamshire. She was encouraged to train as a nurse by an anonymous sponsor (whom she met much later in life and was able to thank).

Her first marriage, to Ronald Wright, with whom she had two daughters, ended in divorce. She married Ian Avenell in 1954. By then, she had become interested in psychotherapy, an interest which he shared. Together, they developed their unique psychotherapeutic method after studying a variety of disciplines and techniques.

Here again, as in her work with childbirth training, Erna was an unorthodox pioneer, her aim in both cases being to empower people to take charge of their own lives. She published two further books, The New Childhood (1966) and Periods Without Pain (1971).

In the 1970s, Ian and Erna also ran a successful restaurant, the Edelweiss, in Camden Town, north London. Erna was an original and talented cook - when she was not out of the kitchen talking to customers. When Ian's health began to decline, the couple moved to Germany, where he died in 1981. In Germany, Erna worked for a time as a nurse in an old people's home, where she found nursing ageing former Nazis a challenging and cathartic experience.

Returning to England, she settled in Wells, Somerset, still full of plans and ideas. She continued to work as a therapist and trained as an aromatherapist. In 1988, a diabetic condition led to a coma, which left her blind.

I cannot be the only woman in Britain to remember her with immense gratitude. She is survived by two daughters and a son.

· Erna Wright, childbirth trainer, psychotherapist and author, born November 28 1923; died August 6 2004