Bernard Levinson, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 94, was a world-renowned psychiatrist and doyen of the profession in SA, where he pioneered sex therapy and the use of hypnosis in the treatment of patients.

He influenced a generation of young clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who idolised him for his willingness to challenge mainstream assumptions and conventional wisdom, going where no-one in the mental health profession had thought, or dared, to go before...