Monthly Archives: August 2011

What does ‘Freudian’ mean?

31 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in Freud's theoretical development, Published Histories of Psychoanalysis

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Since the Freud Archives have been opened, clearer accounts the development of Freud’s ideas have been published – complete with the debates, discussions, disagreements, disputes not to mention emotional blood-letting amongst the great man, his disciples, foes and peers. Freud emerges not just as a genius but an ambitious man  bent on holding his identification with ‘Freud’ and ‘Psychoanalysis’. Historical accounts which do not flinch at Freud’s ambition and its costs – close friendships and affiliations and accusations of intellectual property theft – humanise  this rather reified figure, I think.

Freud’s was also a journey  into uncharted territories. He changed his mind over time. In his  2008 history, ‘Revolution in Mind: the creation of psychoanalysis‘, George Makaris outlines the conundrum lying before followers of Freud in the 1920s. Carl Jung and Alfred Adler had rejected Freud’s psychosexual theory of the unconscious. The Great War and its aftermath – a time of social ferment and change – also provided a milieu in which Freud’s highly specific theory of the unconscious was disputed and ultimately rejected – by Freud – in favour of more provisional, and evolving, theories of  mind and unconscious. On pages 322 through to 323 Makaris writes of the conundrums that emerged.

Which Freud did a Freudian follow? How could there be a Freud when there were divergent Freuds?  …

Theoretical physicists are free to question the most basic assumptions of their field, but it is paralyzing for engineers to do so.  Psychoanalysis did not have separate cadres of theoreticians and practitioners. Science and therapeutics, as well as the competing imperatives of the lab and clinic, were all packed into the same clinical encounter. [There had been a desire] in the growing clinical community to have a stable theory to use, and Freud’s reshuffling of his scientific claims could potentially throw practice into confusion. And just as there had been no clear way to adjudicate among the theories of Freud, Adler and Jung, there seemed to be no clear way to adjudicate between Freud and Freud. Freud’s multiple theories of the unconcious highlighted the provisional nature of all these claims, and their distance from empirical verification and consensus…

Over the next years, new voices would emerge and argue that a community of psychoanalysts could be unified by other means than a committment to a highly specific theory of the unconscious.

Treating Shell Shock. Ethel Mortimer Langdon, ‘In the Mental Workshop – Reflections on Modern Psychopathy’ – 1922

19 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1920s, historical source material

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From time to time one stumbles across a piece of writing, a lecture, a work or object that unclouds another lens into our vision of times gone-by. Until recently I had never heard of Ethel Mortimer Langdon, nor of Sydney’s Women’s Club which was quite active in the first decades of the twentieth century. For that I have to express gratitude to the souls beavering away at the National Library to build its web-site ‘Trove’. The newspaper collection is getting larger by the minute. The search engine is easy to navigate and the online press-clipping service that results is well ordered. Typing the word ‘psychoanalysis’ into the search engine then trawling through the findings one by one was enough to do it.

I retrieved an account of Ethel Langdon’s lecture from the newspapers and from thence  went to the National Library catalogue to find the published copy. It is a little rambling. She appears to have padded  it out. She repeated herself, often. But what she has to say about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as a new form of treatment for anyone – including herself – is clear and important, as people began contemplating its  development in the post war years. Her lecture and her audience put paid to the notion that in the early 1920s knowledge and interest in psychoanalysis was the province of an  exclusive club of doctors, a few lay personages and the avant-garde. It appears that people were beginning to think about the unconscious, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as an option for their own mental distress.

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In the Mental Workshop is the published version of a lecture given by Ethel Mortimer Langdon to the Women’s Club in  Sydney on 5 April 1921. Langdon’s interests covered migration and resettlement and, together with her husband, she was connected with the formation of the Returned Soldiers League ( RSL). While residing in Ireland she was involved with Dublin’s Public Health System,   Housing, Child Welfare and the development of the British Mental Deficiency Bill and its extension to Ireland by the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland. Langdon had had her own troubles and breakdown, and appears to have received treatment in the United States. There is more to learn about this woman and her activities.

There is little information about the Women’s Club other than that gleaned from the online press. It appears to have been founded in about 1900, drawing together professional and educated women actively interested in social and political reform. Members met for lectures, educational events and socialising. By 1922 its membership was about 200.It is not surprising that members of the Women’s Club were interested in psychoanalysis. Knowledge of Freud’s work had reached Australia by 1911 when a group of interested folk  in Sydney began to read his work. Freud himself had sent a letter of encouragement, urging that his work spread to all parts of the world.

After the war ended in 1918 people began talking about their feeling that the world they had known before the war was lost, that Armageddon had been upon them, that the task now was to develop a new order.  What was to happen next was anyone’s guess as the European world watched their political leaders mete out a brutal punishment to Germany at Versailles and the League of Nations formed. In Melbourne, Mr Fitchett, the editor of the religious paper, The Southern Cross, predicted the Soviet Regime in Russia would be the new enemy. The Great War’s killing machines had devastated and shattered the bodies and souls of the men who returned home. During the years of fighting, and afte,r German, British and Allied soldiers alike presented doctors with a new syndrome – hysterical conversion reaction, breakdown, shell-shock, war neurosis –  paralysis of  mind. Doctors on both sides began to throw out Freud’s theory that psychosexuality was central to development. Trauma could be treated by analysis, dream interpretation hypnosis – and catharsis.

Ethel Langdon took up these matters in her lecture.  Firmly disassociating herself from spirituality, spiritism and the supernatural, she set out to elucidate   ‘the cause, cure and effect on present day life on diseases of the mind’. There was no magic; no smoke and mirrors in this. Psychoanalysis, she explained, had developed from Freud’s extension of ideas suggested to him during his time in France under the tutelage of Charcot. Langdon cited  psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, defining psychoanalysis as a ‘method which makes possible the analytic reduction of the psycho-contents to its simplest expression, and the discovery of the line of least resistance in the development of a harmonious personality’. In shell-shock,  she explained, the patient has not lost his senses, but has become jarred and out of harmony’. It symptoms were as varied as the people experiencing them including

‘loss of memory, insomnia, terrifying dreams, emotional instability, diminution of self-confidence and self-control, attacks of unconsciousness, or of changed consciousness sometimes accompanied by convulsive movement resembling epileptic fits, incapacity to understand even the smallest matters, obsessive thoughts, usually of the most gloomy and painful kind, in some cases, incipient delusions’.

The war had moved from the field into the interior of the mind. One might endure calmly face enormous dangers on the battlefield only to succumb to unconsciousness when one reached safety. Indeed it may well be that soldier and tank commander, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, was able to face enemy fire during the Great War, as he has related in his autobiography, The Long Weekend. In later years as he worked his way through memories of these times, he was ‘in hell’. Shock and disturbance was far more serious than it first appeared.

The main worry was wrong and insensitive treatment, Langdon stated There was need for careful assessment of the patient’s disposition, character and earlier personal experiences was essential – for the degree of shock and trauma was contingent on the mind experiencing it.

Langdon also argued that the discoveries and benefits from psychoanalytic treatment of people traumatized by war should be extended to the civilian population and impressed  upon her listeners the necessity to recognise  trauma and emotional distress as being states of disharmony with oneself – and treatable with psychotherapy.Amongst us there are many people who have some idiosyncrasy or who are not quite normal; to label these insane would be absurd, and so it would be an equal sin to call those who, owing to the war and their nerve drained condition, have been forced to abandon their work and who have to be re educated back to civilian life.She advocated treatment for children  ‘showing abnormal tendencies or retarded mental activity ‘when symptoms seem to have no hereditary connection with the parents….A child’s difficulty is generally caused chiefly by his inability to adjust himself to his environment and to adjust his environment to him’.

Langdon praised plans to establish a Chair of Psychiatry at Sydney University. It was essential. It would ensure scientifically proved standards of treatment were established and maintained rather than allowing charlatans and pretenders into the arena. The study of psychiatry, she stated, would ‘bring more knowledge of the wonders of prevention by means of diagnosis and re-education and cure of mind ailments by active scientific means, not just by detention and isolation, not only to the scientific but also to the lay mind.

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In 1923 Langdon’s published lecture reached the editor’s desk for the second edition of the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. A one sentence review dismissed it. Langdon said nothing new about the subject. For a Historian it is revealing comment. One might wonder whether the editor, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University, Sir Francis Anderson was being a little dismissive of a woman’s contribution. His marriage to feminist and activist Maybanke Anderson suggests otherwise. Langdon’s lecture held nothing new for his colleagues and him. As a marker of current thinking around war, shell shock,   psychotherapy and the potential contribution of psychoanalysis in the domestic sphere Langdon’s lecture is valuable source material.


Rilke – on History

09 Tuesday Aug 2011

Posted by in research

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I discovered this paragraph on the very beautiful blog about the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘A Year With Rilke’ – at http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/ . It echoes  my thoughts on thinking about, reading and writing History.  History is about ourselves. Now. It is about the way we see the past and how it affects our present and  future. The people, now dead, who lived in the past –  their experiences, how they ate, slept, fought and played with one another – are part of our formation. Rilke wrote:

Even the next era has no right to judge anything if it lacks the ability to contemplate the past without hatred or envy. But even that judgment would be one-sided, for every subsequent era is the fruit of previous periods and carries much of the past within it. It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective. *Early Journals*

Ivy Bennett – Western Australia.

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in Australian Women in Psychoanalysis

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My trawl through   the National Library’s site, Trove, has enabled some interesting figures to emerge. One of these was the  Australian born psychoanalyst Ivy Bennett – now Ivy Gwynne-Thomas.  In the 1940s, 50s and probably the 60s scholarships of all kinds enabled  country kids to get an education – whether high school or often enough, University. And so it was with Ivy Bennett.  Born on 12 August 1919 in Wagin, a small wheat-belt farming community in Western Australia, she was the fifth child in a family of six. She grew up in Lake Grace, was one of seventeen pupils at a one-roomed, one-teacher school before gaining a scholarship to Albany High School in southern Western Australia. On her matriculation she  gained a Hackett Bursary to study Modern Literature at the University of Western Australia.

As she related to a journalist at Perth’s Sunday Mail in July 1950  it was ‘out of curiosity’ she picked a psychology unit to round off her degree and fell into a psychology career. A second Hackett award – a postgraduate Scholarship – enabled her to study for a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology. Plans for further study in the United States were deferred when war was declared. In about 1942 she was tapped to teach psychology to airforce recruits at the University of Western Australia.

In 1946  a British Council Scholarship took her London and eventually enabled study for her Doctorate at The University of London and at the Anna Freud Clinic. The Western Australian press followed this part of her voyage, reporting her progress on each of her annual visits to Australia. She was young, attractive, representative of hope for the future. By 1950 it was clear that she wanted to train as a psychoanalyst and was planning to return home to work in Perth.  She was able to  extend her  scholarship to train as a lay analyst at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis and returned home, finally in January 1953.  She established her practice as a psychoanalyst from a house near King’s Park in the centre of the city in August 1953.

Although Ivy Bennett completed her doctorate in 1951 it was not until 1960 that she published it  under the title,  Neurotic and Delinquent Children (London, Tavistock Publications). Her research project, begun  under psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander’s supervision, sought to draw together her experience in experimental psychology and her interest in psychoanalysis. It was one step towards developing, in twentyfirst century parlance, an ‘evidence base’ for psychoanalysis – and understanding the influence of family and social circumstances as cause for mental health problems. For the historian, Ivy Bennett’s lucid exposition of work undertaken in the ‘child guidance’ arena by early practitioners who drew on Freud’s work to develop their programs,  shows Freud’s theories to be widening in scope and application during the first half of the twentieth century. W A White’s and Healy’s work with ‘delinquent chidlren’ in the United States aslo drew on that of Freud’s  contemporary, August Aichhon, who established one of the first child guidance clinics in Vienna during the 1920s.

In England Ivy Bennet also unequivocably affiliated with Anna Freud. She was the first student at Kate Friedlanders Child Guidance Centre at West Sussex – also under the supervision of Anna Freud. She drew primarily from  work of  Freud and Anna Freudians Dorothy Burlingham and Kate Friedlander as well as Cyril Burt to formulate her ideas about the causes of delinquency and neuroses in children.  Together with psychoanalyst Kate Freidlander Ivy Bennett designed a project aiming to  study the factors underlying the  presenting problems in a cohort of children she treated at the West Sussex Child Guidance Clinic. Friedlander’s untimely death in 1949 left Ivy Bennett to continue the project alone.

Ivy Bennett’s  argument, that understanding the causes of maladjustment was central to treatment, was central to her thesis. In her book an early paragraph reads,

The establishment of greater precision in our psychological understanding of the causation and development of maladjustment will possibly prove more important in the future than the invention and multiplication of remedial measures and new types of “treatment”. All these latter aim, in effect, at giving the child a new kind of human relationship to replace that which has contributed so greatly to the thwarting or distortion of his development in the past. ( Bennett, 1960, pp.3-4).

It was not about moulding a child’s character, Ivy Bennett argued. Research had revealed that developments in early infancy, if not in intrauterine life,  were expressed in later stages of a child’s development. Although she does not explicitly acknowledge the work of Melanie Klein whose work was influential in this respect, nor that of John Bowlby or the independent Donald Winnicott, her inclusion of their publications in her bibliography suggests she was well aware of their work. Ivy Bennett was also following developments psychoanalytic thinking as it moved away from psychosexual factors Freud had maintained were central to child development. The capacity to manage aggression was integral to the successful development of a child, Ivy Bennett argued. She wrote,’The problem of delinquency ‘is at bottom, that of dealing with uncivilised aggression beyond the control of society and often under the individual’s own control’. The understanding the phenomenon of Aggression – in delinquency and normal life – was a particular key, far more important than solving the ‘urgent practical clinical problems involving primitive and unsocialised aggression’. ( Bennett, pp.31-33). She  stressed the ‘importance of the role of consistency and continuity in the education and training of the child’. It involved understanding and working with the child’s family – parents and grandparents – as well as a child’s teachers and her community.

The War had .seen a shift amongst British psychoanalystsfrom theoretical emphasis on psychosexual factors  to aggression in the aetiology of neuroses and delinquency. Although Ivy Bennett was signalling a shift in her thinking away from Freud’s psychosexual theories as central to the aetiology of delinquent and neurotic children, she appears to have been dubious, or at least choosing not to move away from it altogether.  There was still more research to be undertaken about the role of aggression. The emerging field of group analysis would contribute. Illumination would come from advancing research in social psychology, cultural anthropology as well as in psychoanalysis. At this stage Ivy Bennett sustained her Freudian roots, writing

A blending, fusion and diffusion of both sexual and aggressive impulses takes place and is always present in the emotional sub-strata of community living. The success or failure of this blending or balance determines the varied nature of social life, both in its constructive and in its negative dissocial forms.  (Bennett, 1960, p. 32)

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It may be that Ivy Bennett was part of a larger plan for Western Australians. In the early 1940s there had been a dream for  Perth  to lead psychoanalysis in Australia.  In 1943 the Perth Branch of the British Medical Association apparently drew up plans to establish the largest analytic training institute in the southern hemisphere at the University of Western Australia. This was the outcome of four years work. In 1939 psychologist Bill McCrae, well known to  the Australian public as a cricketer,  returned from the United States where he had studied psychoanalysis. Perhaps prevented from pursuing training due to the US practice of restricting analytic training to medical practitioners, McCrae began to work  to establish a training program for lay psychoanalysts.  He  began lecturing and writing  highlighting the  usefulness of psychoanalysis in education and ‘mental treatment’. He worked in conjunction with local medical practitioners, lectured at the Adult Education Board and, with the support of the medical fraternity, encouraged the teaching of psychology at the University from an analytic point of view. Potentially these lay analysts  would work along with the medical profession. A journalist from Perth’s Sunday Times newspaper appears to have drawn from the planning documents, writing:

The programme envisaged includes a school with analytically trained teachers from kindergarten to leaving standard, a wide scheme of adult and parent education, a clinic to be conducted on a no profit basis, a maternity hospital and eventually a Psychoanalytic Institute for the training of practitioners.

Further research is needed to understand these events and whether Ivy Bennett had a place in this. After all here was a youngish, attractive, talented and ambitious woman who was potentially well placed to contibute to such  developments. At the very least it may well be that the war meant that McCrae’s idea was permanently shelved. It appears though that such was the interest in psychoanalysis at academic and government circles that Ivy Bennett’s proposal undertake training in England was accepted by the British Council who funded her.

Ivy Bennett’s efforts to establish herself as a lay analyst  in Australia appear to have been disappointing. She made efforts to connect with colleagues in the Eastern States and was a founding member of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts. She presented papers at conferences of the Melbourne Insitute of Psychoanalsyis. She left Australia in 1958 to work towards full membership of the International Psychoanalytical Society.

‘I trained to that level so I could have independent recognition in Australia, she told Michelle Slarke. The profession was ‘still dominated by the prejudices I had to fight all the way – the prejudices of medical and insurance authorities against women and lay analysts’.  (Slarke, 2003, p. 51). Marriage intevened. I understand that she had thoughts of returning to Australia but it was her husband’s professional opportunities that took her to Kansas in the United States where she was instrumental in the establishment of psychoanalytic training in that state. She also remembered her days at Lake Grace and has established a scholarship at the local high school to enable a young person to realise their dreams. Too..

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‘The New Psychology’ – Western Australia, 1913

04 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in western australia

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It has been a delight to discover the National Library of Australia’s online digitised newspaper collection.  I remember looking at it in the early 2000s or therabouts and finding a little creaky. It is possible, now,  to glimpse of what people were thinking and reading about  across the country far more than before. The archive dates from about 1830 through to  1954. It covers city, regional and country newspapers.

It is clear that Freud and psychoanalysis – or ‘The New Psychology’  had  a significant following in the first decades of twentieth century Australia – at the time Freud was becoming known in Europe.  Surprisingly for us twentyfirst century sophisticates, interest appears to have been more intense in the more remote places like Rockhampton in Northern Queensland, Broken Hill the mining town in far west New South Wales than in  capital cities such as Melbourne or Sydney.  Kalgoorlie, a gold mining town in Western Australia, was another surprise along with Perth, the Western Australian capital city. The Adelaide Advertiser, edited by the Bonython father and son during the first half of the twentieth century was also a frequent reporter.

In his book, The bold type : a history of Victoria’s country newspapers 1840-2010,  historian Rod Kirkpatrick notes that regional and country newspaper editors  played a pivotal part in their communities. To gather news they needed to know what was going on. They attended meetings and gatherings, they talked to friends, neighbours and were on familiar terms with others. The editors knew the interests of their communities and published accordingly. It maybe, though, that these editors had an interest in the subject. Newspapers were a source of intellectual input for people living in these remote towns. Workers Education meetings and evening lectures provided another source of information.

One of the first items I located in the online collection concerned a lecture: ‘The Aim of Psychology as Illustrated by Recent Developments’ given by Philip Le Couteur, recently appointed as Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy  at the University of Western Australia on 30 August 1913. Le Couteur, born in Kyneton in Victoria, was a Rhodes Scholar. He had studied experimental psychology under Karl Buhler at the University of Bonn in Germany before returning to Australia to take up this post. In Vienna Freud and his colleagues were meeting regularly to discuss psychoanalysis; Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria was first published in 1905. Freud had published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901.

Le Couteur  differentiated psychology from the occult, the spiritism that so interested former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin – noting that psychology and psychical research are different subjects. There is no hocus-pocus about psychology ‘which aimed to explain mental facts.’  le Couteur then  provided a lucid account of the work undertaken by Dr Joseph Breuer and his assistant Freud on the phenomenon of hysteria.  He explained that ‘Freud’s work is completely unknown to general readers and deserves to be better known’.  Further he stated, ‘it shows how the results of purely psychological investigation can be utilised by medicine for the healing of certain diseases’. For Le Couteur, Breuer’s original contribution needed to be acknowledged. Indeed it was

the psychological nature of Breuer’s work rather than the therapeutic that interests us tonight, although the latter is intensely interesting. It was Breuer who first regarded hysterical patients as suffering from a mental rather than physical disorder, and diagnosed and treated them accordingly.

Le Couteur continued, providing an account of dream interpretation, the use of free association and the differentiation between conscious and unconscious processes – the basic tenets of psychoanalytic practice.

Le Couteur eventually left the university to take up the headmastership of Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne. Why he did so is not clear – perhaps it was closer to home and family. But this lecture, published in its entirety,  by the West Australian Newspaper – along with a consistent stream of articles about Freud, his theories and followers published in newspapers across the country in the years to follow – shows that recognition  of Freud’s ideas was not confined to  small groups of doctors, theologians and philosophers with a particular interest in his work,  but found an intelligent readership in places geographically and culturally as far away as one could be from cosmopolitan Vienna.

References:

1913 ‘THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.’, The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954), 2 September, p. 5, viewed 04 August, 2011, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26883990

The University of Western Australia, School of Psychology, website: The History of Psychology, 1913-1918, http://www.psychology.uwa.edu.au/community/history/1913-1918 accessed 4 August 2011.

Rod Kirkpatrick, The Bold Type: A History of Victoria’s Country Newspapers 1840-2010, Ascot Vale, The Victorian Country Press, Association, 2010.