As a young man, after an initial interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, my friend Alex Barakan, who has died aged 99, went on to develop his own style of therapeutic psychology.

Whether as a client or friend, it was the quality of his listening that was so striking and which was so appreciated by the hundreds of people he helped throughout his long life.

Alex was also extraordinary in his curiosity and his openness to new ideas and insights at the very forefront of knowledge, and at an age when some people have settled comfortably into what they believe and think. In his 90s he was still helping other people to cope with their troubled lives.

His Polish mother, Bela, and father, Romo, who was an engineer, lived through the horrors of the first world war, and were so poor that when they married in Nancy, France, in 1914 they used curtain rings as wedding rings. Alex was born three years later, followed by his sister, Thaïs. Their childhood was spent first in Sweden, where Romo worked for the woodturning firm Walter Hempel, then in Paris and, from 1936, London. Romo opened the firm’s new showrooms in both capitals.

Educated in Stockholm and Berlin before taking his first and second baccalaureates in Paris, from an early age Alex was interested in psychology, but with the world in such turmoil his father insisted that he got “a proper job”. Alex then studied aeronautical engineering at Northampton Polytechnic Institute, north London.

He was rapidly recruited by De Haviland to work on aircraft design, initially in Portsmouth then, after the factory was bombed, at a secret country house location in Esher, Surrey. His mathematical ability proved of service in the war effort through his rapid calculations for safety aerodynamics of troop transport planes. Then, in 1947, he finally struck out on his own.

His lonely journey into psychoanalysis, initially in the US under Wilhelm Reich and later in London, was not understood at home, and life in his Bayswater flat with his partner Patricia, an artist whom he met in 1948, was not always easy. Patricia died of ovarian cancer in 1978. Perhaps it was a personal life that contained so many challenges that made Alex so receptive to the problems of others.

A polymath interested in all new inventions, space, cell biology and genetics, he was fluent in English (without a trace of an accent), French, German, Polish and Swedish, and also spoke some Russian, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, which he taught himself.