Anne Kantor (1935-2022)

It has been some time since I have plunged into an archive, whether newspaper or documentary to record impressions of the history of psychoanalysis in Australia,New Zealand and the Oceana region. Archives are full of rich pickings. The fact that Australia recently hosted the IPA Asia Pacific Congress in Sydney in early May 2024 is testimony to how much the profession has grown and developed.

Growth occurs in little ways. How people come to psychoanalysis is often a personal story. But who suggested this? Who opened the door? And what happened next? I have often found there are small stories which, like a budding flower, open into a larger frame. Anne Kantor’s contribution to the development of psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Melbourne, Australia is one of them.

For me it was as a student in social work at the University of Melbourne. In 1979 I was was sent on a fieldwork’s placement to the Citizen’s Welfare Service in Victoria in Carlton. CWS was the latest incarnation the Charity Organisation of Victoria founded in 1889 by a Committee which included Vida Goldstein’s father, Jacob. Vida Goldstein went on to become an advocate for women’s and children’s rights and the first woman to stand for parliament. But that is another story. Over the decades CWS worked with a number of people in need of charitable assistance. Increasingly counselling services came within its ambit and by the late 1970s the social workers at CWS were discovering psychoanalysis and developing their practice through their own analyses. Many sought analysis through members of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society branch the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis. APAS had become a component member of the IPA in 1973. And the newly formed Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists ( 1975) operating independently of either APAS or MIP was conducting its first training course in psychoanalytical psychotherapy. Some of that cohort are still practicing. It was exciting times for the psychoanalytic profession.

For me, young, greenhorn, the placement was the door to my future. But it was also a door for my fellow student, Anne Kantor, a mature age student, a mother of a brood of children, and, unknown to most at that time, a member of Melbourne’s philanthropic Murdoch family. She had planned to qualify in social work so as to further her understanding of this arena of her work. For several years she had plugged her way through her degree. For her the student year at CWS was life changing. She discovered the unconscious, how internal reality shapes attitudes and behaviour. Freud, Klein, Winnicott and co were bedside reading. She would laughingly relate her childrens’ wonderment at her ‘reading all these psyche books’. And pressed on. Inspired by the then senior clinician, Fay Johns ‘a good mother to me’, Anne began to hope that she too could find her way into a more formal position. After we finished the six month placement, and for me, the degree, Anne appears to have another subject to complete. Anne graduated at the end of 1980.

By then she had gathered her fortitude and had sent a letter to the Executive Director of CWS asking for a job. She read the letter to me over one of our regular lunches and thus encouraged, sent it off. Unsurprisingly she was taken on and remained working for that organisation for almost twenty years. When the time came she applied for and undertook her training for the Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists commencing, I believe, in 1984. I was working in other spaces, but still interested in psychoanalysis.

Over the years Anne continued her work: with adults and children, patients who attended CWS which was operating as a kind of low cost clinic providing psychotherapy services on a sliding scale. These were the days when the Federal government funding was not so conditional, nor, as it came to pass, defining evidence based treatment in a very narrow sense. Anne was well aware of the arguments over the evidence base, and clear that this included psychoanalysis. The work with family relationships defined as those entering, within, or leaving a close personal relationship, could be addressed through psychoanalytic paradigms such as object relations and relational approaches. Fees, at CWS, were on a sliding scale according to capacity to pay. Anne was committed to ensuring that all who needed help could get it, reducing the agency fee accordingly. Another example of the low cost clinic originally promoted by Freud.

During these years Anne had cause to pause and reflect on her philanthropic role, thinking about what it meant to ‘be so very lucky’ as to have money and where she could most effectively put it to good use. The Anne Kantor Fellowship run under the auspices of the Australia Institute, is one outcome – developing opportunities for young women to develop their political and social careers and contribute to various think-tanks in Australia. She has also funded CASSE, an organisation assisting young indigenous people in Central Australia. There may be others who have talked at length with her about her ideas about philanthropy.

For the psychoanalytic psychotherapy world in Melbourne there was a generous donation to a low lost clinic, The Glen Nevis Clinic, run in association with the Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists also provides a ‘low cost’ service. She contributed to peoples’ employment funding at CWS, which now operates under the title, Drummond Street Services, but prior to this, as Drummond Street Relationship Centre. This included funding for a migrant service, and also for the position of Co ordinator of Education and Training, during the years that I, by then holding that position at DRSC developed an ran a Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy Training program offered at Clinical Masters level at the University of Melbourne in the early 2000s. For the Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists she purchased a building in Erin Street Richmond, and donated it to the organisation. The VAPP continues to operate from these premises.

Anne sometimes spoke of her severe childhood illness, Osteomyelitis, and her need for hospitalisation and later, nursing care ‘to get me though’. Possibly, she reflected once, this might have shaped her path to choose a career to help ‘get others through’. The choice to enter Social Work and Psychotherapy were hers, a path to forging her own identity, at a time when even then expectations of women were framed in terms of family and home. She could be sharply critical but with an eye on the benefit of the larger project. She was a woman and professional of her time. There is a larger story to be told, a biography to be written, I am sure.