Monthly Archives: July 2013

Some Bits About ‘Charlie Winter’, Oral History and a ‘Biography of Psychiatry’

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in South Australa

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 I was introduced to historian Inga Clendinnen at a conference in the 1990s when she discussed her paper :then titled ‘Writing to Rouse’ subsequently published  as ‘Fellow Sufferers: History and Imagination’  at the Australian Humanities Review site. Is history fiction? she wondered. Is it merely a recording of the facts? Some of the most boring history reads as such. Narrative is pared of meaning and depth. Subjectivity is  thrown out of the window in the quest for objectivity.’Listen to historians talking’, Clendinnen writes. ‘You do not (often) hear paranoid priests or rumbling ruminants but men and women of passion and sense talking about their respective obsessions. Neither moral sensibility nor compassion nor reconstitutive imagination is lacking—until we come to write. It is then’, she says, ‘that the dragons rear and block the path. Yet we still talk about “writing up” as if it were a routine activity approximately comparable to mopping the floor.’

I find Clendinnen’s thinking exciting. She is encouraging us historians to enter into the experience of reading and writing, to engage with personages past without hiding behind some stultifying theory in the name of objectivity. Perhaps it is about working with one’s ‘transference’ to the material. But then after the research is done something else from within takes over after the exhilaration and discovery of research. Call it as one’s critical superego if you like. It is as if we have to put on our social face, present  a ‘civilized’ version of ourselves. We are compelled to avoid, what Inga Clendinnen refers to as ‘the upright personal pronoun’ in our work. History which is about the study of people, why they do what they do when they do it is suddenly self conscious. It is as if the emotional state that underlay many actions, past and present; the interactions between people, the hatreds, loves, envies jealousies and greed should remain a secret. It is a great loss.

And so it can be with autobiography. What I have to say next may well be construed as criticism of a very significant figure in Australian psychiatry, William Andrew Dibden President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatrists from 1965 to 1966. Dibden who took pen to paper, bought a tape recorder and collated oral histories and has published it as his autobiography. Not many people do that and of course this work should be recognised. What I really want to do is to encourage people to go back to the source , to the material recorded in the oral histories that inform this work and to see and feel the humanity of this author. In the moments of candour that emerge from the transcripts one is meeting a very thoughtful person.  His collection covers all facet of psychiatry from the discovery of the effectiveness of Cardiozol and ECT in the treatment of depressed people to psychoanalysis, child psychiatry, social work and group work.

There is  his work on human rights.  Dibden established the South Australian Association of Mental Health and, as its leader, he was largely responsible for raising public money to found a chair of mental health at Adelaide University. During his period as director of Mental Health Services in South Australia, he rewrote the mental health legislation – a body of work which foreshadowed the reforms of the civil rights movement and that of Brian Burdekin who chaired the National Inquiry into the Human Rights of People with  Mental Illness published in 1993.

I have just spent a couple of days in the South Australian State Library reading Dibden’s collection of oral history transcripts. Dibden’s intention was to write a Biography of Psychiatry. Unpublished as a book in his lifetime – he died in 1991 – it is now online. He collected interviews from key people in South Australian psychiatry during the twentieth century.These include Harry Southwood who later trained in psychoanalysis, John Cawte, Harry Kay and a host of others.

The interviews are full of the life of this man. We learn of his grief, when as a medical student he contracted Tuberculosis and realised he would never realise his dream of being a Rhodes scholar; of falling into psychiatry after a brief and disastrous stint as a country GP during WW2 when, after barely six months as an intern, he replaced the doctor who had enlisted. He speaks frankly of these, but omits them from the final version. As he also does when he glosses over the impact of his psychoanalytic experiences. It’s a pity. The final result is flat and a powerful story of the development of a man is drained of life. Autobiography can be so much more than this.

Returning to the interviews Dibden  introduces us to ‘Charlie Winter’ – a psychoanalyst to whom he owes an immense debt of gratitude. Karl Winter was a German psychoanalyst who completed his training in the 1920s. Winter arrived in Australia in the 1930s – a refugee, together with his wife who was Jewish, from Nazi persecution. A brilliant clinician and psychoanalyst  he was accepted as a psychiatrist by the Australian medical system in the early 1970s – and then after a campaign by Dibden and his colleagues. He was never accepted by the Australian Psychoanalytic Society. South Australian Psychoanalyst Harry Southwood – who was trained in Australia related that when the matter was put to its head, Clara Geroe, she insisted that he had not done the training! He was analysed by one of Freud’s Inner Circle, Hans Sachs, before falling out with Freud on the matter of infantile sexuality. I am not sure why Geroe was so implacable. Did she think she was preserving the name of Freud? Winter taught Dibden – and other South Australian doctors about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Dibden and his colleagues are  polite. If anything, writing from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it appears that Charlie Winter was not recognised as a psychoanalyst by the Australian Psychoanalytic Association is to its detriment.  But Winter is undoubtedly credited with awakening Dibden’s interest sufficiently for him to sell up and take his family to London in pursuit of training as a psychoanalyst in the early 1950s.  He was appointed to the Maudsley Hospital, discovered child psychiatry and applied for analytic training. But he balked at the five year committment – for financial reasons as much as any, and ended up with an analyst named in his memoir as Edna Oakshott –  for Dibden who was going to conquer the world she was, he says ironically, a student, a woman and not a doctor!!

Dibden’s time with Oakshott was life changing for him – a matter about which he talks at legnth in his interviews. But nothing in the autobiography. To be brief Dibden returned to Australia eighteen months after leaving, resumed practice – including psychotherapy – and eventually moved into leadership positions in Australian Psychiatry – including his stint as President of the Australian and New Zealand Psychiatrists Association in 1965 -66.  His psychoanalytic experience not only sustained and influenced his work but also provided an internal secure base from which he worked. For his drivenness and his ambition had dissolved on the couch.

There is much more to write on this very thoughtful and reflective man who emerges from these interview transcripts.  It takes courage to write about oneself and to defeat the shyness and the need for a public face that might come with imagining a critical audience….Dibden, who died in 1991, has left a rich legacy in these oral histories now lodged in the University of Adelaide Library and the State Library of South Australia.

More About Foundlings

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Child Study, History of Emotions, Infancy

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Photographs of people in times gone by have a particular poignancy. In his article, ‘The Undead: Necromancy and the Inner World’, psychoanalyst Jed Sekoff writes about how one might contemplate a photograph, or a portrait – or a piece of writing – ‘until it hits you: the subject or the writer is dead’. This piece of writing, that photograph is a monument – much like a gravestone – designed  ‘to counter memory’s propensity to fade.’ A photograph is a moment frozen forever. Sekoff writes, ‘It is ourselves we wish to dominate, to fool time, to trick death, to resist the relentless movement of the world’. He continues:

Looking at a photograph places us at the edge of a certain time. Neither the moment before or after. Yet, this singular moment, ever present, ever still, evokes a boundless space, alive, in motion. The dead are somehow conjured into life. And yet again this very magic makes their death all the more certain; our loss stares us in the face. We might better describe the boundless boundary of the photographic image as a peculiar frontier – ‘a region that forms the margins of settled territory’… – where the flora and fauna of the past, present and future are captured in one compact space.

It seems to be part of the historian’s craft to fill in the background, to describe the  past that is, before being named, an invisible and apparently empty space. The act of interpretation enters  this space.  There is always the differentiation between my present day ‘self’ and the historical/cultural ‘other’.

In the Australian Town and Country Journal published in November 1901 these two photographs appear. They were taken at Sydney’s Ashfield Infants Home which was celebrating the opening of its new wing.

Scenes from the Ashfield Home

Scenes from the Ashfield Home

According to the Australian Women’s Register the Sydney’s Ashfield Infants Home, established as the Sydney Foundling Hospital in 1874 and  became the Infants’ Home in 1877. It assumed responsibility for the care of infants of single mothers and destitute parents and provided a temporary home for the mothers. Rules for admission established in July 1874 ‘required firstly for each application to be dealt with on its merits; secondly, for the infant to be no older than three months; thirdly for the mother to produce satisfactory evidence of her previous respectability and fourthly there had to be proof that the father had deserted the baby and be beyond the reach of the law to enforce him to support it’.

The lower photograph shows thirteen of some forty children residing in the Home where , despite being ‘some of the happiest and best cared-for youngsters in Sydney’, they lacked parents, relatives and names – excepting that their guardians have bestowed upon them. These are the foundlings, stumbled upon by a policemen or left at someone’s doorstep. No one ever sees the person who left it there – a reporter wrote. There is never a clue to its identity. Mother and infant are lost to one another. But, the Town and Country these children had a great claim upon society ‘by reason of their absolute helplessness’.  And so begins an account of the Home as a showpiece of all that is ‘best practice’ that was early twentieth century child rearing at a time when, according to well known Adelaide doctor Helen Mayo, infant mortality was high – particularly amongst the children of unmarried mothers.

Two or three years before reports from the Child Study Association, formed in Sydney in 1898 had begun to focus on infant behaviour, the sounds and gestures they made as communication. Following developments in the United States and United Kingdom well known anthropologist Professor Alan Carroll gathered a group of interested men and women to meet with the purpose of studying the child mind. During the next two decades the Association included leading educationists and welfare officials as well as drawing interest from feminists and women leaders such as Maybanke Anderson.

 More recently historians have been exploring the intersection between psychology and emerging ideas about children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The historian Sally Shuttleworth’s The Mind of a Child published in 2012 explores ideas about infancy and childhood during the  nineteenth century  Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Edmund Gosse’s autobiographical account of his childhood  illustrate the growing apprehension of children as having different and separate lives to those of the adults around them. Missing from her account  is Thomas Hughes’s 1857 classic: Tom Brown’s Schooldays, about the world of boys and school but this is a minor quibble against the richness and thoroughness of Shuttleworth’s research into the development of nineteenth century psychology. The ‘current cultural dominance of Freudian theory has tended to obscure the interesting pre-history of child psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century’, Shuttleworth writes. (p.18). She points to Charles Darwin’s observation of one of his children in 1840, published 37 years later in the journal, Mind, as a response to  M Taine’s  essay ‘The Acquisition of Language by Children’. M Taine established the practice similar to what has become known as Infant Observation. The observations, M Taine wrote, ‘were made from time to time and written down on the spot.In his study the  subject of them was a little girl whose development was ordinary, neither precocious nor slow’. He detailed each movement, moment by moment.

From the first hour, probably by reflex action, she cried incessantly,
kicked about and moved all her limbs and perhaps all her muscles. In
the first week, no doubt also by reflex action, she moved her fingers and
even grasped for some time one’s fore-finger when given her. About the
third month she begins to feel with her hands and to stretch out her
arms, but she cannot yet direct her hand, she touches and moves at
wrandom; she tries the movements of her arms and the tactile an
muscular sensations which follow from them ; nothing more. In my
opinion it is out of this enormous number of movements, constantly
essayed, that there will be evolved by gradual selection the intentional
movements having an object and attaining it. In the last fortnight (at
two and a half mouths) I make sure of one that is evidently acquired;
hearing her grandmother’s voice she turns her head to the side from
which it comes.

M Taine’s account of a baby’s discovery of herself in the world prompted further investigations using child observation  In 1898 An American woman, Millicent Shinn , building on the work of the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, published the observational study of her niece, ‘The Biography of a Baby’.Shinn’s methodology also drew on the work of Dr Joseph Le Conte  on a daily basis from birth, drew  was a response to the notion that through scientific observation one would that ‘children in developing passed through stages similar to those the race had passed through’. Even so, Social Darwinism which placed white society at the top of the tree relative to asian and aboriginal societies remained a strong underpinning in people’s’ thinking about children. During a visit to the Ashfield Babies Home in 1903, the writer “Barbara Baynton” wrote of her encounter with a small boy, ‘Australian born of Indian Parents’.

Quick and agile as his unknown forbears, he darts into the arena, and gripping one of the visitors around the knees [ensures] at least her attention. Releasing his hold, and flopping on the floor, he demonstrates conclusively that heredity is stronger than environment, doubling, twisting, contorting, somersaulting till his swarthy smooth skin flushes muddily. Standing erect he raises his hands above his head preliminary to a dry dive, and one is immediately transported to Columbo, with its shoals of child-beggars and their incessant cricket-like chirruping of “I’ll dive! I’ll dive! I’ll dive!”

We learn of Rangi’s parentage. He is about seven. His mother died at birth and he was placed in the Home shortly afterwards. His father visited for a short time… explanation enough to twentyfirst century readers about his neediness. Here though it is undestood in terms of heredity…His performances, the author writes ‘was not taught nor caught from association with his kin or race’. ( Sydney Morning Herald: 18 July 1903, p.5)

In his 1930s publication, The Civilising Process  Norbert Elias also argued that  in the latter half of the nineteenth century children were increasingly seen as less as little adults – as when the philosopher Erasmus was alive in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – but  as children in their own right. Increasingly they were separated and segregated from adult concerns.

The development of orphanages segregating children from the adult world of the workhouse were one response. An Infants Home – a space where small children were raised until they were ready for adoption or fostering – with air and light, space to breathe and the provision of good food was considered essential. It was far away from the dingy crowded squalor of the workhouses and the orphanages were children were herded without maternal care. Such children ‘never grow properly if you have the lot of them together’, wrote  English activist, Florence Davenport Hill in her 1867 book, Children of the State. ‘They only grow up into half-idiotic men and women’.In overcrowded conditions even a ‘good nurse was unable to relate to each child as an individual. Nor was there time to ‘draw out the intelligence of every child and nurse it as it would be nursed in a family home’ ( p.235).

So what do we see in the photograph of the thirteen babies at Ashfield? One of them is crying. Another looks solemnly into the camera. Are there others not ready to sit up? There are so many of them. We wonder who is caring for them and wonder about the impact of parental loss upon the children. For the reader in 1901 it is clear that the Home is a triumph, the photograph of healthy active babies a tribute to the modern techniques that are being followed in the care of the children, some of whom were very ill from neglect and starvation when they arrived.

The emphasis is upon luck. The idea is that environment rather than heredity will prevail and ultimately help the children to live better lives. We learn about the physical surroundings of the Ashfield Home, the flowers and trees evoking a sense of fecundity and care. But there is also the beginning idea that environmental provision also means psychological provision. There is the perception that loving care is best for children. We can be assured that all is well.  The staff are trained: ‘duly qualified in the difficult art of nursing children’. Unmarried mothers also reside in the Home performing domestic duties – *the more reliable ones*  assisting with the children. And at the Home they remain, these babies, until they are around three years old when they are taken over by the government and boarded out to foster parents.

Perhaps the best indicator of the Home’s success, the Town and County Editor writes, is the demonstrable affection between the children and their nurses… deemed better than most mothers. ‘Few mothers have the knowledge and tact which the staff nurses possess, and still fewer are able to spare the time which is devoted to the little ones here… A child does not pretend to be fond of its guardians just because visitors are present…’

For readers in 1901 these were lucky children.

References

 Jed Sekoff, ‘The Undead: Necromancy and the Inner World’, in Gregorio Kohon, (ed), The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 109 – 127.

Florence Davenport Hill, Children of the State 1867.

Australian Town and Country Journal 16 November 1901, p,38.  nla.gov.au/trove

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Foundlings

06 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by in Australian History, Feminism, Government policy

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I have been tracking newspaper items about foundlings – newborns abandoned by their mother – from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. The state: New South Wales although I am sure the other states had similar matters to consider.  Foundlings were newsworthy. This entry is not  atypical but it is rather more fully reported than many such items. It was published in 1879.

A FOUNDLING

A strange discovery was made on Saturday night at Ashfield, by a gentleman living near the Foundling Hospital, who found attached to the gate of his private residence a red carpet-bag containing a healthy-looking   female child, apparently about 2 week old,wrapped in a piece of soft flannel. The other contents of the bag were a glass feeding-bottle and the following letter written in a neat female hand, and addressed to the matron of the Foundling Hospital:—

“Dear Madam,

—Please to be kind to this dear little girl, for it is hard, hard, for me to part with her; but I am a poor girl and have not the strength to work for its support; but if things turn out better than they are at present I will send money for its maintenance. Please call her Hilda McCarthur, and a fond mother’s blessing will be your reward. For the present, I do wish it was in my power to keep the dear little lamb, and the great God above, who is the only witness to my sorrow at this moment, will forgive me for this cruel act; but I hope I may yet, perhaps, in after years, show her a mother’s care, for a mother’s love she has already. And now I once more beseech you to call her the name mentioned above, and to be kind to her, for she is very good. And I remain, my dear Madam,

— A mother in sad, sad trouble.” (The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954) Monday 7 July 1879 p 5).

One line of interpretation might be to consider the mother’s background – single, holding a secret, torn between her love for her baby and social expectations of her; hoping, vainly, most likely, that she might find a way to support her infant. Perhaps she was an educated lass, of the middle classes where education was more than basic reading and writing. She wanted a particular name for her child: what does that mean? In a society with so very few rights for single mothers, where illegitimacy was a mark of doom; a sign of inherited degeneracy, this mother was giving as much as she could to her child.

We can only imagine what might have happened next. Little Hilda would have been taken in and cared for, perhaps in a large nursery. Perhaps she was boarded out, Maybe her mother was able to find a position – as a servant or governess. It is clear though that she was one of many that the government of the day was turning its mind to – at the urging of a group of leading women and, indeed, if this report is indicative, sympathetic newspaper editors.

In 1881 New South Wales was one of the first of the Australian colonies to pass legislation making provision for state children to be boarded out – fostered – with families. The  government, led by the venerable and colourful Henry Parkes, was influenced by a group of women – including Lady Mary Windeyer  whose concern for the well being of orphans and foundlings was awakened by British reformer Florence Davenport Hill through her friendship with South Australian woman reformer, Caroline Clark. Hill had written of children living in workhouse and barrack style conditions, their uniformity, the subsequent loss of individuality and the ‘idiocy’ resulting from lack of parental care and bonding. Caroline Clark whose advocacy of boarding out also determined the direction of South Australian government policy. In her little book published in 1907: ‘State Children in Australia’  South Australian  author, reformer and also a  friend of Caroline Clarke, Catherine Helen Spence wrote of the value of boarding out for these abandoned children. Not only  was their vitality apparent but the bonds formed with their foster families continued beyond these formal arrangements. Far better, she affirmed, for the stability of the state.

Hill, Clark and Spence all argued for the contribution of environmental factors as these interacted with inherited traits. They challenged popular notions of abandoned and illegitimate children being of inferior genetic stock – a position affirmed by American sociologist Richard Dugdale in his 1877 study of five generations of a New York family – which he called the Jukes family. Seeking to  understand the origins and intergenerational transmission of ‘crime and dissipation’ Dugdale, I suggest, affirmed the importance of  environmental factors in early infant development… traces of thought taken up by  Freud  and later theorists of the infant mind: D W Winnicott and John Bowlby.