Monthly Archives: June 2020

Imperial fossils, a piece of enlightenment, and a small triumph: a cathedral adventure – OR – Do statues float?

21 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in British Imperial History, Colonialism and Imperial history, Imperial History Britain

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During our British sojourn in September 2019 we trecked from Durham to Carlisle to visit the cathedral there. Carlisle Cathedral, is the seat of the Anglican Bishop of Cumbria. Wikipedia tells me it was founded as an Augustin priory and became a cathedral in 1133. It is also the second smallest cathedral in the British Isles and renowned for its ancient stone choir and for its vaulted blue ceiling.

BBC Choral Evensong: Carlisle Cathedral 1985 (Andrew Seivewright ...

Our guides there have told us two stories about this deep blue ceiling. The first is that it is a restoration of the Cathedral’s medieval ceiling. The second is that it is a Victorian decoration. We await the true story.

Cathedrals are important. A journey along their walls, floors and rooms tell us about the people who lived in the city in times past. It is about displays of family wealth and power, as well as grief, loss, and the community. Middle class Britain was built, for some, on eighteenth century slavery, or the monies realised with emancipation. The Church, particularly, the Anglican Church, was its expression. The Anglican Church was also a centre of Missionary activity at home and abroad.

It is probably not the done thing to climb up onto the lectern from where the minister preaches. But there was no apparent barrier. It seemed OK. The result was my letter to the Bishop and a reply from the Dean of the Cathedral.

My letter:

30 May 2020

Dear Lord Bishop

I visited Carlisle Cathedral during September 2019… my second visit from Australia, and a return visit  after discovering the Cathedral in 2018….I am interested in the way the Church represents itself to the people and is also an expression of contemporary culture.

During my visit to the cathedral last year I chanced to clamber up to the lectern from which the minister preaches. Upon this was a document, an account of the Britishers marvelous defeat of a rebellious African tribe during the nineteenth century. It was good British imperial stuff… extolling the virtues of the British Empire and all that.

Historiography has moved on. Historians today are immersed in the darker side of Empire. They are thinking about and exploring the appropriation of land and culture of indigenous people. They want to understand what the African, and indeed, indigenous people, were fighting for. And they are finding that the experience of invasion and objections to it to be valid concerns. 

The document on your lectern in 2019 is of historical value for its triumphalist story of empire. We need to know that this is what people of the Empire actually thought to be the truth. And we need to examine why this was so. Imperialism and colonialism are complex issues. Indeed for as many triumphalist stories of Britain’s place in the world as there are, including the one on your lectern, there are many documents querying these stories if not the the basis upon which Empire was built.

I suggest that the document on your lectern needs to remain but to be placed alongside a more  critical, if not revisionist, account of the very destructive activities of missionaries and others in places like Africa and India. My fear is that by not doing so the members of the Cathedral will show themselves to be locked in the past, and maintaining the nineteenth century/ early twentieth century phantasy that all is right with the world as long it is British – and white.

I leave this for your consideration and look forward to your reply”.

The Dean of Carlisle Cathedral replied on 18th June 2020.

Here is the text.

“Your email to the Bishop of Carlisle has been forwarded to me as the person responsible for Carlisle Cathedral. I am very grateful to you for writing as you have done. I am glad you climbed into the lectern and took time to read the notice that customarily rests there.

I have made enquiries. I understand that the text on display is the one received and put in place here when the lectern was lent to the Cathedral by Ivegill parish in 2003. It has not been reviewed since –not least, perhaps, because when the clergy mount the steps of the lectern to read a lesson at one of our services, a full size bible is in place that covers the paper with the notice on it.Your letter reaches me at a very timely moment. Across this nation, and much more widely, an important debate is running which shows us how important it is, as you suggest, to continue to interrogate the way the past is understood and interpreted.

Your helpful comments ensure that we will think again about this and any notice we have on display and how it might be interpreted. The Cathedral Chapter does not want to be thought to be locked in the past or to maintain a view of imperialism and colonialism which many used to hold as you set out in your email. I shall have time do this work before the Cathedral opens to the public again after the restrictions we have been observing during the Corona virus pandemic”.

Good for them!!

‘The continual inner search: the life of Roy Winn’ – Australia’s first practicing medical psychoanalyst (1890-1963)

10 Wednesday Jun 2020

Posted by in psychoanalysis and biography

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Margaret Winn (2020) The continual inner search: the life of Roy Winn, Melbourne, Kerr Books.

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Margaret Winn, Roy’s grand daughter, has compiled this biography, published by Kerr Books in Melbourne in 2020. It is a labour of love, a task that has consumed a number of years, off and on. Margaret has sought to understand the rather remote figure of her grandfather who died in 1963, when she was 11 years old. He was not very interested in what she had to say, she recalls. But he was remembered by his psychoanalytic colleagues for his integrity and his contribution to the development of psychoanalysis in this country. This book, written for her family, is also Margaret Winn’s contribution to the history of psychoanalysis in this country.

Roy was born into a privileged family in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1890. He was the third of four sons of William and Janet Winn and a member of a leading, ‘God fearing’ family, members of the Primitive Methodist Church. His father and uncle Isaac Winn were active in church affairs but are also remembered for Winn’s Ptd Ltd, a super emporium store located in the middle of Newcastle. William Winn the deputy president of the Temperance Society – and young Roy took the pledge at the age of seven. Not unusual for young children in this age of evangelical Christianity. As a young man Roy wanted to be a medical missionary – the Australian Methodist Church had a mission in Fiji.

A significant section of the book is devoted to Winn’s war service… from his decision to sign up as a Medical Officer in 1915 until the war’s end. Winn lasted until the end of the war. After losing his foot towards the end of the war, he returned home and, eventually found his way to psychoanalysis. Reg Ellery, another psychiatrist interested in psychoanalysis, returned home at his own expense within a year of signing up. Winn’s Melbourne colleague, Paul Dane struggled with illness contracted in the field. And, like Winn, went on to use his war service in his later work with veterans.For her grandfather’s story Margaret Winn has consulted historians and libraries to trace her grandfather’s path through the war. Winn’s novelised version, ‘Men may rise’, is her guide. She thus contributes an account to the increasing pile of such family histories to the Australian historiography of war… and the foundation pile for historians of psychoanalysis in this country. For it is in Winn’s reflections, recorded in Men May Rise, that he comes to understand that he is both doctor and patient.

In 1920, newly married and with a child in tow, Winn and his wife travelled to England for Winn’s analysis with Robert Riggall, a member of the recently formed British Psychoanalytical Society. He returned to Australia in 1922 and tried to interest colleagues in the application of psychoanalysis to medical work. It did not work out and, in 1931, Winn left hospital practice altogether, and established his own practice in Macquarie Street Sydney. Margaret Winn also notes that her grandfather was not a trained psychoanalyst: he made use of what he had learned through his own analysis and reading, with patients. He was appointed as an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1935.

Winn was actively involved in the effort to bring European Analysts to Australia during the 1930s. He was a liaison point for Ernest Jones in London, who, in one of the twentieth century’s great rescue efforts, found places in the United States, Britain and in some Dominion countries for a large number of psychoanalysts potentially trapped in Europe as the Nazis took control. Alone, and together with a number of leading figures in the Australian milieu of that time, lobbied the Australian government for their admission. Of the six who applied, only two succeeded: Andrew Peto and Elisabeth Kardos who were granted visas late in 1939. They decided not to emigrate. Clara Geroe, granted a visa with her husband, arrived in March 1940 and was subsequently appointed as Australia’s first training analyst through the British Psychoanalytical Society. Winn continued as an Associate until 1952. At this point he funded the establishment of the Sydney Institute of Psychoanalysis. By then Andrew Peto had arrived and, like Geroe, was working as a training analyst.

It was one of Winn’s colleagues, Janet Neild, who referred to the ”continual inner search’ that he carried through his life. This may have been his public face, or his working persona, or the place where he could carry out his own internal mission. Margaret Winn, a family member with a different experience of Roy, wants to understand her grandfather’s mind, as much as she can. She speculates about his ‘autistic’ side: wondering whether this contributes to him being something of an ‘outsider’ – and thus able to strike out on his own. ‘I am not sure he was autistic’, Margaret Winn wrote to me in an email. ‘ He might be the source of the genetic thread to later generations who do manifest high functioning autistic characteristics’. This is, after all, for the family’s understanding.

In another, professional, sphere, Roy Winn’s contribution is important for Australian psychoanalysis. He helped bring it into the medical fold and held its place within Sydney’s medical world. In a sense his work and dedication to seeing psychoanalysis established in this country was his quiet – and greatest- achievement.

On Clara Lazar Geroe’s personal library: thinking about biography

09 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Historical research, historical source material, History of Child Guidance, Hungarian influence upon psychoanalysis in Australia

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And so Clara Geroe’s personal library landed in my storage unit. Her son’s family home is being cleared for sale in due course. He kept everything and now all is on its way to a new home. Some of it was distributed to her patients by Clara’s husband, Willi, after her death. He invited each to choose a book as a memento.

Libraries are personal collections of a life: books are connected with moments, an outcome of a small story that resulted in the decision to purchase, or borrow, a book. They are clues to a conversation, or a private moment. It is amazing to learn that Clara seems to have liked detective fiction. Or that she had an eye for political cartoons – at least she did when she visited Britain in 1961. There is a collection of books focussing on events during the holocaust – including an English edition of George Faludi, a Hungarian poet and essayist’s account of his experiences during the war years. In Australia, a thoughtful purchase made during her holiday in Queensland, was Arthur Groom’s 1949 One mountain after another – a travel book, perhaps, but also a commentary on settler’s role in indigenous dispossession, and the environment.

Clara’s professional books date from the early 1920s when she was doing her medical training. And so we find a handbook on medicines and mixes in Hungarian. She was interested in psychosomatics, was a student of Pal Ranschberg and contributed a paper to the neurology section of Ranschberg’s Fetschrift: Psychologische Beobachtungen bei Hyperventilationsversuchen an Epileptiken : Psychological observations on hyperventilation experiments on epileptics ( Google translate). Leopold Szondi was also a contributor to this section with a paper: Uber die klinische und pathogenetische Zweiteilung der Neurasthenie – in English, About the clinical and pathogenic division of of neurasthenia. It is worth noting that by 1928 when the Fetschrift was held, Clara was undertaking her psychoanalytic training. That three of the four sections of the Fetschrift focussed on Modern experimental psychology, Child psychology and pedagogy, and child psychotherapy, show that this arena of psychology was well developed when she decided to focus on child analysis and pedagogy during the 1930s. She brought her collection of Hungarian journals in this field with her to Australia in 1940, anticipating that she would develop this area of practice.

Scattered through the collection along with articles in Hungarian – including papers gifted to Szondi and to herself – how did she come by Szondi’s copy? – are various psychoanalytic journals from the 1940s. Possibly they landed on her book case and stayed for ever: The British Journal of Medical Psychology and The International Review of Psychoanalysis, among them. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s publication: on Children and War – in German. And of course Sandler’s final publication of the child psychology indexing committee. Some publications by Freud: Moses and Monotheism, and another of his selected essays, gifted by Kata Lev,y are also there. Towards the end of her life, she seems to have become interested in feminist literature although these books are not signed as being hers. Then there is Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Klein and Riviere, Bettelheim, and even Russian text – in English – on Pavlovian Psychology published in 1950. This is an important book for our understanding of the Stalinization of psychology in Hungary as well as the USSR. And more… Clara was interested in socialist thought. She was also intrigued by anthropology.

A most interesting item among all of this is the 1935 copy of the International Psychoanalytic Association Membership list. There are no representatives from Australia in the British section although Mary Barkas, from New Zealand, who became an Associate in 1923, is listed. Roy Coupland Winn from Sydney was either about to become an Associate, or was too late for the listing. In the Hungarian section Clara Lazar ( she did not use her married name) is listed as a full member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society alongside 20 other full members – among them the Balints, the Levys, Vilma Kovacs, Hermann, Hollos, Almasy, Geza Roheim. Two Associates, Edit Gyomeroi and Maria Kircz-Takasz are listed. Endre Peto who emigrated to Australia in 1949, and Erszebet Kardos are absent… perhaps they were still in training.

These books are the relicts of a life, indicative of the complexity for a biographer – neither to rehabilitate nor damn, but to understand how a person represented herself to herself and others, within the realm of her particular social unconscious.