Monthly Archives: May 2016

Matilda’s Therapy – London, 1944

11 Wednesday May 2016

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Session III : Thursday 18 May 1944

Matilda is living near Belsize Park Road, part of a community of German-Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler in the early years of the war. After a period working as a fire watcher during the Blitz she was employed as a clerk in an organisation assisting refugees.

Recently she has been romantically involved with  two men – Robert whom she met several months ago and Monty, with whom she has been going out with for a long time. Both are serving in the military forces in some way. It means they are away, overseas, for long periods.  There are long gaps between meetings.

She has been puzzled about her response to Robert with whom she had felt, upon meeting, that there was much to bind them together. Potentially. She had felt herself to be in love, but doubted her capacity for this. But then? She is writing in her second language, or her third. It is difficult to decipher meaning as a result. Her thoughts seem disjointed, her tenses are all over the place. She might be unable to write down her thoughts. The intense feelings are too much, maybe.  The mind, I think, is not an orderly space. She writes,

I have some of that feeling of panic and emptiness.  I vaguely feel that something is wrong with Robert and wonder at the same time whether this is not a projection on to him of my own vacillating emotions?  With Monty I feel warm and comforted in that warm and paternal presence, although I often come across traits that  disturb me: sentimental, self dramatising, petit-bourgeois. But there is a kernel which is good and comforting. It is not for me a feeling of ‘This is what I have been dreaming of long ago’, as it was when I met Robert, but it is positive nevertheless.

My thoughts and feelings got curiously merged; I did not know to whom my tenderness and my desire went… I was surprised how small and far away Robert became, and then again when I talked to Mother at Guildford there was only Robert. Now he is far away again. And I feel alone.

Yet I don’t want to break the physical aloneness. Why? Seriousness perhaps? Or [am I, to be honest,] merely husband hunting? I feel I must tread softly with Monty and feelings may develop. But in almost everything he does I compare him with Robert…

28th December 1943

Suddenly it seemed a terrific problem. Monty is intense and – I still cannot help feeling –  his somewhat self dramatizing letters which sweep me away on waves of emotion… leave me somewhat high and dry. And then again the knowledge that I don’t want him profoundly. That I am longing for Robert and yet might perhaps just as well give him up.

I feel I ought to marry but I don’t know why; that a lover seems preferable to a husband but at the same time needs more sefl confidence in me. That I wnat children but don’t want them now and am loth to accept the responsibilities…

Matilda’s journeys into inner London, to Harley Street to see Dr W, become central to her. She needs to explore these  quandaries – about men, lovers, marriage and, through her dreams, her experiences as a German Jewish woman, a refugee, in London. This is her third session with Dr W.

I tell him about my fainting fits.

W: The easiest way to escape facing a situation. There must have been an unconscious emotional crisis.

She then tells him about a dream about Robert, and her wish that W solve this problem for her. After all, H,  an old  friend, or perhaps another therapist,  was somebody who solved my problems for me.  W. wont.  

W:  We move round and around the same problem until we outgrow it. -We have found that Mother is a very great influence.

M : Why?  Because I open the door for her. Why do I?

Matilda does not seem to like the thought that her mother is so central to her.

Session IV: Tuesday 23 May 1944

Matilda tells Dr W about her reflections between the sessions…

Matilda: On the one hand I ask Mother about things I don’t really think her competent to . I ask her about small things and put the full responsibility upon her if things go wrong. On the other hand I don’t tell her anything at all and resent all… interference.

W: Both are symptoms of immaturity.

This comment stays with her long enough for Matilda to record. We do not know what transpired next. We are working with the gap between event and memory. What has been suppressed?

Matilda: I felt completely lost last Monday after leaving Robert.

W: That feeling can not be got rid of so quickly.

Matilda: Query: Was it sexual because of F.l?

I wonder whether she is referring to ‘Father Love’ here.  Is she beginning to doubt the reality of her connection with Robert, seeing it as a enactment of her internal life?

W: No.

Matilda: Dreams. Element of conflict. Mother on one side,  [her father?] on the other. Neither is myself….

Matilda’s diary is hard to follow. Like the analyst we must follow these residues of  her thought and find a pattern.  She seems to be freely associating as she converses with herself about herself and about her experience of Dr W.

She begins with two dreams – about a man on a bike and an association: Unsolved question: Who is the man I feel is interfering?

Dream about railway station: Conflict of wanting to make contact with Robert but not quite daring. There is a dream about a flower, her feelings; an element of the emotional  connection she is making with Robert.

W: I am not interfering in your relationship with Robert in any direction.

Matilda: I feel better about it since now I don’t feel I ought to marry,  and can carry on for the time being. There is probably a lot of egoism in it in that I want to keep him, (Robert) until I  can do without…

 

 

 

 

 

 

The doctor -patient relationship – 19th century writings

10 Tuesday May 2016

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This is a guest blog by Alison Moulds, second-year DPhil student at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her thesis examines the construction of the doctor-patient relationship, and the formation of a professional identity, in nineteenth-century medical writing and fiction … Continue reading →

via Representing emotion in the doctor-patient encounter in Victorian medical writing — The History of Emotions Blog

A diary of an analysis 1: Meeting ‘Dr W’.

01 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in 1940s, Case study, what happens in psychoanalysis

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The patient, a woman aged 25 when the analysis begins, is a Londoner. I shall call her ‘Matilda’. Her diary begins in May 1944 and continues until the end of the war.

I met Matilda for the first time when she was in her eighties during one of her visits to Australia. Perhaps her awareness that I work as a psychotherapist prompted her to speak about her own experiences in analysis. He was a Jungian, she said. She recollected seeing him in the early 1940s, several years after her arrival as a refugee from Nazi Europe.

This is her first session. I will use italics for her actual written words.

London: Wednesday 10 5 1944

No couch – relieved. Comfortable chair. Fatherly, not very interesting man, looks more business than doctor.

‘Dr W’  asks for her name, age and about her parents whether they are living or dead. She has a brother and sister? and her work? Does she like it? and does she have a boyfriend? He asks her about her school and leaving Germany.

To her surprise he asks about my scar; thinks this is an important incident ( I had not mentioned it all, never thought of it). Asks whether boyfriend is ‘first and only’…what interests? Is graphology a deep interest?

Conclusion: No firmness, psychologically non-existent, swimming about. Thus no firm relationship is possible. Must become… ?  and develop firm feelings. It will take a little time.

I say I have no patience.

You must learn it, he says. It is like the growth of a plant. It cannot be rushed. One can work if one knows what for.

Dr W advises her not to talk to anybody about her analysis. He warns her that it disturbs the progress if a third person takes part. It is to be between the two of them. Matilda continues her reflection.

On the conscious level I seem all right. [The] problem lies somewhere else.  I have to find and keep… [the] secret of myself.

Matilda attends a week later. She full of dreams, ideas and associations. I do not know whether she has read Freud’s work? But here she is curious… it is as if she has begun the work.

Dreams  – underlying factors – She feels there is no basis, the diary records. She is running about in a terrrific inner muddle. Floating from one thing and one person to another.  She has put her bag on a chair – in a dream or in the consulting room? It indicates that I want to occupy a place somebody else has.

Dr W asks Matilda about her mother. She was distant and aloof when I was small and needed her. It made me suspicious of love and unable to accept it. He explains that there is the parallel with a  dog  who after being shut in a dark room, starved and beaten is coaxed by the same and other persons. He will be perplexed and run away. 

How frightened Matilda must have been when she was a little girl. She continues,

I mention the element of cheating that goes through my dreams. Dr W replies.. if I do not know who and what I am I cannot face [matters] and am bound to cheat.

*****************************************

Who, I wonder, is Dr W?  Matilda described him as a Jungian. If this is so, then  Dr Ambrose Cyril Wilson is a possibility. I find an obituary for him written by D W Winnicott in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol 29, 1958, page 617. I have made inquiries and excluded Winnicott himself.

Wilson  was the son of Ambrose Wilson, headmaster of Melbourne Boys Grammar School in the 1890s. The family had travelled from London, to Cape Town then Australia before returning permanently to London where Cyril matriculated and decided to study medicine.

Cyril Wilson qualified in medicine at Barts in 1908. He served in the Army during WW1 and then had a stint as an actor. He was an early member of the British Society of Psychoanalysis from 1924.   He began analysis with a Jungian, Robert Young.  After two years he had transferred to Ernest Jones and thence to membership of the British Society after qualifying. After a period of financial strain during which he looked into analysis with James Glover, Winnicott continues,  Wilson was in  analysis with Melanie Klein for seven years. He was on the staff at the Society’s clinic, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis until 1945.

The dates add up and the little bit of information Matilda provided about her analyst’s identity points to Wilson. As a refugee Matilda would have had some financial constraints upon her… it is not impossible that the London Clinic was her preferred option when she decided to seek analytic help.

Winnicott seems to have respected Wilson’s ability. He wrote of him:

Although Wilson never contributed significantly to psychoanalytic theory he did a good deal of original work on the paternal aspects of the superego. This he never assembled in written form nor could he be persuaded to write up his findings after his appointment by the Home Office to study homicide cases at the Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.

Wilson had a fighting sense of rectitude, Winnicott continues. He gave himself almost solely to his patients, and was militantly independent and in the Society eschewed politics.  He was particularly interested in the treatment of offenders and was an early member of the Institute for  Study and Treatment of Delinquency and in the final stages of his career a consultant to the Portman Clinic in London.

I am intending to follow Matilda’s progress session by session, placing it alongside  historical material that could help contextualise her experience. It is a glimpse into the world of British psychoanalysis in the last years of the war … It will be interesting to see what happens.