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Freud in Oceania

~ Histories of psychology and psychoanalysis in the Oceania region

Freud in Oceania

Monthly Archives: September 2011

Explorations in Oceania

30 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by Christine in Anthropology and Colonialism

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colonialism, Crossing the Beaches, Ethnographic History, Greg Dening

As much as anything Freud’s theories emerged duirng those centuries when Europeans and Indigenous peoples were engaged in an encounter which effectively altered the way each thought about their particular cosmos. It is not unlikely that Freud’s urging that psychoanalysis  be spread across the globe reflected this broader move – although, I think, applying European notions of the Oedipus Conflict to cultures whose structuring and conceptualisation of family and social relationships were so different, was missing the point, rather.

However in my desktop explorations of the blogosphere I have found this series of links to museum collections of oceanic art objects.  Relics of the colonial period such items were brought back by explorers of the region.

The historian, Greg Dening, wrote of ‘crossing the beaches’ – crossing that no-man’s land between the known and unknown world. When one is a visitor in a country and culture other than one’s own one is always negotiating gaps in understanding about what is assumed to be so, or not. Eighteenth century European explorers were tourists as well as inveterate collectors, if not pilferers and plunderers of other cultures. Perhaps the essential ‘otherness’ of such cultural artifacts also affirmed the explorers’ essential European-ness as well as generating much anxiety about and apprehension about what was civilised and what was not.

The ‘Number 1 Delinquent Factory’ and Other Matters ..

22 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by Christine in Psychology Training - History, University of Western Australia Archives

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Children in Care, ethical standards. uses and abuses of psychology, Institutional care, Psychological testing, what have we found here?

Newsy letters home can provide moments of unguarded observation – and for historians, a snapshot of a particular social mentalite. In  December 1943 Ivy Bennett, then an assistant lecturer in psychology at University of Western Australia, was visiting New South Wales on a study tour – to look at institutional care for state children and to visit the Psychology Department at the University of Sydney.She had just been awarded a Master of Arts for her study of the social behaviour of pre-school children.  Her letter to her boss, Professor Robert Fowler, head of Psychology at the University of Western Australia, reveals not just a facility for acerbic observation, but clear grasp of the  psychology discipline – and trenchant criticism of the state of teaching and practice amongst her New South Wales colleagues. The letter is dated 12 December 1943. (UWA Archives Cons 507).

On her arrival in Sydney after a long flight over Ivy visited several government institutions housing state children – comparable to those back in Western Australia. She recounted,

I don’t know whether you know any of these but I have been to NSW’s No.1 Delinquent Factory, the Girls Industrial School at Parramatta, which is a shocking place, full of 100 16 and 15 year olds with hair dyed blonde or red, a common ambition to either work in a milk-bar or go to Long Bay Prison, and a joint hatred for work, respectability and the barn-like conditions under which they live. It gave  me much food for thought.

Ivy also visited ‘May Villa’ and ‘Castle Hill’, institutions for training ‘defective boy wards of the state’. The latter was less than 12 months old but have some ‘idea of the standard for which the Child Welfare Department is aiming for’. She visited the girl’s equivalent – ‘Brush Farm’ at Eastwood and ‘Montrose’ – a home for pre-school wards. She was most favourably impressed with ‘Lynwood Hall’ at Guildford ‘which caters for problem rather than defective or delinquent girls and is in the charge of two women graduate teachers’. Opened in 1939 the Lynwood Hall was managed by principal, Mary Lamond. She was succeeded by Edna McMaster, then Una Smith , Daphne Davies, Mrs Johnston, Jean King and Christine Conlon.  Ivy agreed with the principles on which it was developed:

I spent a most engrossing morning being shown the routine of the place, and the very real work that is being done in developing the self-respect and self-direction in a group of 60 saucy young lassies which think they have learned about ‘life’ from their American servicemen friends.

It was Ivy’s discussion with psychology students at the University of Sydney that raised in her real, ethical concerns about the state of training in psychology in the eastern states. She listened to their disappointment with  the course developed by Dr A H Martin assistant to Professor Tasman Lovell –  renowned for his pioneering work. Dr Martin’s course she described as a ‘nasty pill which must be swallowed before the students are keen enough can get out and train themselves in practical mental testing – a self-training which must be most painful and arduous’. Ivy, whose work in this area was scrupulous and thorough, worried about the potential for misuse.  ‘Most of them do astounding things with the Binet, have never heard of performance tests and make recommendations upon the basis of a doubtful Binet IQ which make my most incautious blunders appear pale pink beside them’.

I don’t want to appear over critical, but I’ve had the greatest difficulty keeping my opinions to myself in the face of the most obvious floundering and flagrant abuses of testing procedure among people supposedly trained graduates in psychology….Only the outstanding student who has it in him [can] get by on his own. A few others have awakened  to their weakness and are very woeful about it but most just flounder and are very unhappy when abuse comes – to their credit – or give up in despair. I think the demand for real clinical training among the students is so strong that the Sydney Psychology Department must be either blind or deliberately ignoring it.

Interesting….

Related articles
  • Psychoanalyst Ivy Bennett – Perth, Western Australia – 1952-1958. (freudinoceania.com)
  • ‘The New Psychology’ – Western Australia, 1913 (freudinoceania.com)

Deciding Who Will Be In Charge

18 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by Christine in Conferences and Lectures

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Brazil

In the Middle east at the moment dictatorships are being overthrown by the will of the people – some of whom are making and publishing films like this: The source of these videos, Qunfuz,is a blog following these events – tracking this conflict between government and governed. He highlights not just the loss of confidence in the government, that was gone long ago, but the ‘something’ that enables people to gather, join forces and work towards their own brand of collective freedom.

At the Australian Psychoanalytical Conference yesterday Dr Claudio Laks Eizirik a Brazilian and past president of the International Psychoanalytic Association talk about Power and its legitimisation.  He spoke of the power of repression, of unconscious drives; the power relationship between parent and child ( does he mean ‘authority’ here?) and of the relational nature between government and people. Eizirik cited Winnicott‘s ideas on democracy – a convenience whereby power is ceded to ‘government’ by the larger group so that individuals can get along with their lives.. It is a little different, I think, from the parent-child relationship; perhaps more expressive of a collective (unconscious) will.

But what if this relationship breaks down?  In answering this we may begin to see what it is that is ceded to the leader and why it is they come and go. In Britain Winston Churchill was the leader for the war, between 1939 and 1945. He related to and articulated something necessary for the British to be able to continue to fight and survive against enormous odds. Before and after this he seems unable to find the necessary pulse to be able to lead.

Claudio Laks Eizrik’s questioning was illustrated with his own experience of the Brazilian uprising followed by the takeover by the military in 1964. It had begun in 1961 when the president,Quadros, in office just seven months, resigned. He was to have been replaced by the Vice President, Goulart, then out of the country visiting China – a country a long way away and suspiciously Communist. Goulart was accused of being such by right-wingers. He was initially not able to take office, only doing so after protracted negotiations by his brother-in-law in 1963. He legitimized his position through a referendum.

Goulart’s attempts to socialize the country were countered by demonstrations -popular uprisings –  followed by the Army’s decision to take control. More detail  is here. Claudio Laks Eizrik remembered being in the crowd of protesters facing the Generals outside the presidential building when someone began to sing the national anthem. The crowd followed. After a pause the general joined them.  At that moment, ( this is my reading of it), the General joined the people. He gained enough legitimacy for the coup to succeed without bloodshed.

I don’t have any great insights to offer here. Other than to say that when the leader is out of touch with the people’s will but continues to rule, a kind of tyrannt can be set up where the leader holds the governed in thrall. As a ‘metaphor’ for the analytical situation, it is also a warning…

Psychoanalysis and Culture : universal psychic truths”.

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Christine in seminars

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APAS Open Day, Melbourne

The title of the Open Day of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society to be held in Melbourne on Saturday 17 September at the Treacy Centre.  Here is the blurb for it. To quote:

Dr Claudio Laks Eizirik (Brazil), distinguished international speaker and past president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, together with Dr John McClean and Associate Professor Frances Thomson-Salo of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (President and past President) will address the ways in which intrapsychic forces, which can be identified and analysed in the consulting room, may also be played out in the wider social group…

How might we understand, for instance, what in the human psyche enables individuals to rise up against hatred and oppression, to confront the abuse of power, as demonstrated in the “Arab Spring” uprising and the recent turmoil/eruptions in the UK?

The Mind of a Child

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by Christine in seminars

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Child psychology, Social Sciences

I found this via another history blog: Boston 1775 – devoted to things American and eighteenth century.It is inviting submissions to a session of the  American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies to be held between March 22 -25 2012. It is entitled:  “The Mind of the Child in the Eighteenth Century” .

This panel hopes to explore intersections between two major emerging fields of eighteenth-century studies: children’s literature and cognitive literary studies. Papers might address the extent to which pedagogical theorists considered the minds of children; if and how children’s texts envision the material brain; how the emerging field of child psychology shaped literary and cultural notions of childhood; scientific experiments on children; the place of the child’s mind in eighteenth-century poetry; children and the Royal Society; or a range of other topics. Papers with an interdisciplinary focus are especially encouraged.

The contact person is Patrick C. Fleming,

219 Bryan Hall, English Dept.,

U. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22903; E-mail:  pcfleming@virginia.edu

 


On ‘Freud’s Excellent Adventure’.

08 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by Christine in Published Histories of Psychoanalysis, research, settler culture

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Australasian Psychiatry, History

One might assume that interest in Freud in early twentieth century Australia was limited to the cities – and so it was for medicos and others who sought to add psychoanalysis to their practice. This would fit with the notion of psychoanalysis being a theory for the elite and educated; hardly known beyond scholarly circles – and certainly not in country towns a day or more in travel time away from the  city.

It appears that distance is not – was not – an impediment to learning and intellectual interest. In an article published in the June 2010 edition of Australasian Psychiatry historian Robert Kaplan  writes of the invitations from a Sydney Study group to Freud, Carl Jung and Havelock Ellis to present papers at the Ninth Session Australasian Medical Congress held in Sydney 18-23 September 1911. Freud might well have been surprised, although psychoanalysis was spreading beyond Vienna.  In 1910  the International Psychoanalytical Association was established at Nuremberg with Jung installed as its head. Branches had been established in Hungary, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States. Now the southern hemisphere beckoned.

In response to the Sydney Group’s invitation, Freud sent a paper. So too did, Jung and Havelock Ellis whose ideas were, by then, diverging from Freud’s insistence on the sexual basis of the neuroses.  Freud explained the tenets of psychoanalysis; Jung’s paper ‘The Doctrines of Complexes’ began with a word association test and argued that complexes ‘occurred in normal individuals, neurotics and psychotics’. Ellis’s paper, Kaplan says, ‘succeeded best at explaining psychoanalysis to readers’ although he was critical of Freud’s rigid adherence to his theory of the sexual aetiology of the neuroses. Kaplan, however seems a little surprised that there was such a high level of interest at this stage.

To have a psychoanalytic interest group by 1909, followed by the invitations to Freud, Jung and Ellis in 1911, was well in advance of many other countries, bearing in mind that psychoanalytic involvement in Europe was restricted to very small groups in capital cities. There is nothing to indicate a similar response in any other Southern Hemisphere country, if not further afield of the Europe/ American littoral.

It was not as if Australian mental health treatment was lagging behind  trends in Europe. Practitioners were up-to-date with contemporary literature. Kraepelin’s 1896 work on Dementia Praecox was well known. Eugenics, a key paradigm in UK, USA, Germany and Austria was being thoroughly studied. Practitioners adopted treatment methods developed in the  USA and Europe – insulin treatment for schizophrenia and electroconvulsive therapy for depression. In Melbourne in 1949 John Cade pioneered the use of lithium in the treatment of bi-polar disorders. By then psychoanalysis had also found a base in Melbourne: Paul Dane, Reg Ellery and others established the Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1940.

Australian settler culture in the early twentieth century consisted of a large number of first generation migrants who retained strong personal links with ‘Home’  I well remember my Australian born grandfather speaking of England has home although he had never been there. My grandmother’s family in England regularly sent newspapers and magazines with their weekly letters. It was a way of keeping in touch with the Home to which they would never return. It was inevitable that developments in Europe would be transmitted to the Australian scene very quickly.  Perusal of the newspapers reveal items republished from the British press.  Newspaper journalists often referred to English locations in familiar terms – few needed an explanation.Until the mid twentieth century, at least, the British Medical Association oversaw the training of medical practitioners and developments in the field.Talented scholars – medical and lay – returned ‘home’ for advanced education. Distance was an inconvenience to be borne.

Historically, developments in primary production enabled Australia to begin to pay its way and, in 1901, be proclaimed as a nation in its own right – not as a  colony of Britain. Along with this was the developing infrastructure of rail, telegraph, mail; schools, libraries, churches and of course local and regional newspapers. The latter integrated national and international affairs with local reportage. They may have also reflected editorial interests – even if the editor also reflected upon the interests of their particular reading community. Perhaps this explains why psychoanalysis found a following in regional centres and the smaller capital cities. Between 1920 and 1940, a period covered by my particular survey of newspapers digitized by the National Library of Australia, newspaper editors as far afield as Cairns and Rockhampton in northern Queensland, Broken Hill in far west New South Wales and in Kalgoorlie a small western Australian gold mining town, often published items explaining Freud’s theories. So too did the editors of the Adelaide Advertiser and Perth’s West Australian. When Freud left Austria for Britain in 1938, the cables detailing his journey were published in Broken Hill’s Barrier Miner. When he died in September 1939 these papers published an obituary.

Reference: Robert M Kaplan ( 2101) ‘Freud’s Excellent Adventure Downunder: the only publication in Australia by the founder of psychoanalysis’, in Australasian Psychiatry, Vol 18, No.3, pp. 205-209.

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I am very interested in your comments, suggestions and responses to this blog and its content - good, bad, indifferent. It is all part of a broader conversation - about history, about psychoanalysis and the way people think about things. So if you'd like to make a comment on this blog, please feel free to do so. And, if you are interested in conversing further or, indeed, want to 'speak' to me offline my email address is freudinoceania@gmail.com I look forward to hearing from you.

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