Category Archives: 1910s

When the Psychiatrists Invited Freud to Australia… Sydney 1911

06 Monday Jan 2014

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Historians of psychoanalysis in Australia agree that a first point of contact for psychoanalysis in Australia was through the former Reverend Donald Fraser who, in 1909, wrote to Freud advising him of a reading group of people interested in his work. Two years later an invitation was extended to Freud, Jung and to Havelock Ellis to speak at the forthcoming Medical Congress in Sydney in a letter signed by one of the members of the group, Andrew Davidson, then Secretary of the Neurological Section of the Australian Branch of the British Medical Association. There was some discussion between Freud and Jung about whether they would send a conjoint paper. Historian Stephen Garton notes that Freud politely declined but sent a paper ‘outlining the central tenets of psychoanalysis’. Jung also sent a paper.  The two were in the throes of falling out: from 1912 they did not see one another again. Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, as Garton continues, sent a paper to a subsequent Congress in 1914 (1). From this point there was some isolated interest in psychoanalysis from amongst the medical profession, particularly those medical specialists in psychological medicine who returned from the Great War having learned about the application of Freud’s techniques in the treatment of war neurosis.

The full membership of Fraser’s little group is not known. Generally the narrative centres on Fraser himself, described by Freud’s biographer and advocate, Ernest Jones, as having been kicked out of his ministry in the Presbyterian Church for his Freudian views.

Further research has put paid to such notions of martyrdom on behalf of psychoanalysis. In a short biographical piece published in 1978 Historian Angus McIntyre provides evidence to show that Fraser, who came to Australia from Liverpool, UK, in 1893,  fell out with the Presbyterian Church in Newcastle by 1896. It is not clear why: whether from disagreement with the ‘establishment’ or drunkenness. After an attempt to begin his own church Fraser left the church to recommence medical studies at the University of Sydney in 1904 (2). Nevertheless as a result of a letter from Roy Coupland Winn who had set himself up as the first psychoanalyst in private practice in Sydney Australia, in which he made a connection between Fraser’s interest in psychoanalysis and his departure from the church, Jones has recorded Fraser as something of a martyr to the larger cause. That Winn was vague about the facts of Fraser’s case is revealed in MacIntyre’s paper. (2) Myths are created thus.

While commentators have grabbed hold of this incident as evidence of Freud’s deeper interest in Australia – he once fantasied in a letter to his fiance about moving to Australia, if only to establish himself well enough to be married- it is worth thinking about why he and Jung were invited in the first place. Davidson, who read Jung’s paper at the Congress appears not to have been particularly interested in psychoanalysis and appears not to have pursued it after 1911. After resigning his post as Medical Superintendent at Callan Park Hospital for the Insane in 1912 he frequently appeared in the press as an expert witness in trials of people accused of crimes as varied as murder and fraud to husband desertion for the next two decades. He was member of the Eugenics Society – a body whose membership Freud declined. He died in 1938.

It is the job of Secretaries of such bodies as the British Medical Association to act on behalf of their committees. By looking at those matters that occupied the thinking of the membership; their concerns over time and the tasks that filled their days we might begin to see something of what might have prompted an invitation to Freud and Jung. As colonials, the leading psychiatrists of the day were also recent emigrants, bringing their British training, their experience and their knowledge of the continental intellectual milieu informing their work and practice. Fraser, who had begun his medical studies in England, switched his training to that of a clergyman.Perhaps he was following his father -also Donald Fraser – who was well known as an ideas man and for his work in the Presbyterian Church in England. Perhaps young Fraser’s insomnia -prompting his migration – was symptomatic of some sort of conflictual relationship between father and son. Perhaps his interest in psychoanalysis was borne of an intellectual curiosity similar to his father’s. We can but speculate here. 

Andrew Davidson qualified in Aberdeen in Scotland before coming to Australia where by 1903 he had succeeded another well known doctor in the lunacy field, native born Chisholm Ross, as Medical Superintendent at Callan Park. Chisholm Ross had also trained in Scotland, at Edinburgh University before returning home to Australia and work with another Scottish born and educated doctor, Eric Sinclair, Inspector General of the Insane from 1898, a graduate from the University of Glasgow.Obviously there is a Scottish influence in the development of Australian Psychiatry.

Upon the commencement of a new building, the Psychiatry and Neuro-Surgical Pavilion at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in 1935, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald took the opportunity to reflect upon its history. He was careful to record that Davidson – by then a senior and well respected figure in Sydney psychiatry – who some thirty years before had spoken of the need for individualised treatment methods when the
when the unit’s ‘predecessor’, a special ward was set aside at the Reception House, Darlinghurst, for curable cases of mental disease in 1908.

“One hopes that Sydney, though it now has a small hospital in a special ward at the reception house, will do still more, and establish wards with out-patient facilities at the Prince Alfred Hospital, or that a hospital such as is being built in Melbourne should be erected close to the University. This would mean that individual treatment could be given in each case, all histories fully investigated,causes definitely ascertained, and treatment therefore given on a rational basis”. (3)

According to the Herald the special ward at Darlinghurst and the subsequent erection of a psychiatric pavilion at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital was actually suggested  in 1905  when Davidson’s superior, Dr Eric Sinclair said that accommodation for curable mental patients at public hospitals had many advantages over anything a special department could provide – not least the reduction of overcrowding.  He argued that early treatment prevented long term, serious mental illness and incarceration. The Historian Professor Stephen Garton highlights Sinclair’s indefatigable work for recognition of psychiatry as a scientific and respectable arm of medicine. Garton says Sinclair

led a movement to establish the treatment of mental illness on a scientific footing and to have psychiatry recognized as a legitimate medical science. To these ends in 1909 he established the department’s pathological laboratory where mental patients were tested for various medical pathologies. Sinclair sought to replace older terms such as psychological medicine with modern terms like psychiatry. He believed in the importance of training specialists and successfully advocated a chair of psychiatry at the University of Sydney, established in 1923. (4)

Sinclair was not averse to standing up to governments, Garton continues. He sought to legalize voluntary treatment and opened the first  first public psychiatric ward for voluntary patients in 1908. In 1915 he authorized the admission of voluntary patients to State mental hospitals despite the absence of any authorizing legislation. His bluff succeeded: successive governments refrained from stopping this practice.(5)

A third notable in lunacy reform was  W.Beattie-Smith – another Scottish trained doctor and colleague of Sinclair, Davdison and Fraser who opened the The Neurology Section of the 1911 Medical Congress. Beattie-Smith who had emigrated  almost thirty years before had spent twenty-one years administering asylums in Victoria. He had built his experience beginning as Superintendent of Ararat Insane Asylum (1881) where, according to his biographer, Eric Cunningham Dax, he developed a small wine-growing industry. He was an advocate of training for nursing and mental health staff and encouraged the Scottish system of boarding out selected mental health patients to the community. Not all people who became mentally disturbed needed incarceration. His paper “Insanity in its Relation to the Practitioner, the Patient and the State, published in the Australasian Medical Gazette for February 1903, sets out his system of diagnosis and management of mental disorder beginning from mild melancholia to severe delusional illnesses. Beattie-Smith drew the distinction between patients who needed treatment in an insane asylum and those who might well need special care in a nursing home, if not at home. There was a systemic problem: that certification under the Lunacy Act assumed that the person was of ‘unsound mind’ and that – as a result – the person was fit to be detained in an asylum. Further the medical practitioner, privvy to the internal workings of the family in which the individual lived, needed careful training to be able to assess whether the person needed to be certified. He provided a summary of his 21 years of experience as a medical practitioner in Victoria, advocating the Scottish system of training of both medical and nursing staff in treatment rather than custodial care.When he published his 1903 article he was about to retire as President of the Ballarat District Branch of the British Medical Association.

At the Congress Jung’s paper “The Doctrines of Complexes” was read by Davidson. ‘It began with a description of the word association test, the research that had first brought him fame’, the historian, R M Kaplan writes. He continues:

From this arose Jung’s discovery of the complex which occurred in normal individuals, neurotics and psychotics. Commencing with the tactical feint that the neuroses arose from psycho-sexual conflict which could only be uncovered by means of Freud’s psychoanalytic process, he trumped this with the statement that dementia praecox involved a “characteristic and different behaviour” that would end up in dementia. Using the same post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic favoured by Freud, he justified these assertions by stating that proof was not required because the subject was already a “special science”, known as analytical psychological or, pacé Bleuler, depth psychology – making a clear distinction from the Viennese version.(6).

Freud,’s paper for the 1911 Congress, ‘On Psycho- Analysis,’ numbering but three pages, was  more peremptory. Kaplan reflects its tenor – Freud seems to be lecturing down to an uneducated audience he assumed to be ignorant of psychoanalysis. Kaplan writes:

Easily the shortest of the three papers, his explanation of the principles of psychoanalysis was terse, to say the least, and a significant portion was devoted to attacking those, especially in psychiatry, who rejected its tenets. Anyone critical of psychoanalysis, Freud stated, should “analyze his own person”, concentrating on their dreams. Freud’s masterful rhetoric and superb literary skills notwithstanding, it would seem to be a misguided effort to send such a paper to a far-distant group expected to know next to nothing about a theory that was far out of the boundaries of knowledge, if not conventions, that they inhabited.(7)

The invitation from the Antipodes, so far away from Europe and Vienna, must have astonished both Freud and Jung. Freud saw it as a sign his work was expanding. Jung, perhaps, found it another way to promote his ideas amongst medical peers. But for both, I suspect, Australia was too far away to think seriously about attending the Congress – whether or not they had the means.Australia was, for Freud at least, the site of primitivity, where Aborigines the lowest of the low races on earth could be found. At this time when Social Darwinist theory ordered humanity it was not surprising. Missionaries also preoccupied with such theories sought to establish that Aboriginal people had souls, that they were capable of an English education and were civilisable. All of this is considered racist these days, but these were the theories extant at the time. Where Jung found evidence of the ‘primitive’ in himself during his journey to Africa, so Freud also located it in his work, Totem and Taboo.

The Australian doctors who tried to arrange for the presence of Freud and Jung appear to have had a different agenda to Freud’s and Jung’s desire to promote their work. Qualified in England and Scotland, emigrants when they were adults, and well aware of the to-ing and fro-ing of information between England, Europe and Australia as their students departed and returned and new migrants arrived, it is not surprising that they were well up-to-date with contemporary ideas about mental health treatment and medicine.  They may have seen themselves as leaders, using the opportunities afforded in the Andtipodes to make good some of the frustrations encountered at home – as well as in their interactions with the government of the day – as they attempted to develop world leading treatment for insanity. It may be that they saw in the work of Jung and Freud potential methods for individualized treatment which would serve to prevent admissions to the asylums.

Based on a careful reading of available documents – the annual reports, newspapers as well as secondary sources a portrait of doctors who were proactive in their quest for better treatment for mentally ill people emerges. These were also the colleagues of Melbourne based John Springthorpe whose later work with war affected patients also drew on psychoanalytic ideas. It made sense, I think,  to this group of reforming doctors that the best in the world in the treatment of lunacy should be invited to their Congress. They were arguing with the government of the day. They wished to demonstrate to their peers and to government officials that that there were alternative and viable methods and techniques to custodial care and incarceration in the treatment of mentally distressed people. That Freud not only did not come to Australia but, in his paper,  failed to appreciate the knowledge of his peers in what to him was a faraway, if not exotic, land, could well have been have been a huge disappointment.


(1), Stephen Garton, ‘Freud and the Psychiatrists: The Australian Debate 1900 -1945’, in Brian Head and James Walter (eds,). Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, p.170.

(2). Angus McIntyre, ‘The Reverend Donald Fraser’, Australian New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, v.12, June 1978, p.109-113.

(3).1935 ‘MENTAL DISEASES.’, The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), 15 October, p. 10, viewed 5 January, 2014, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17215833

(4). Stephen Garton, ‘Sinclair, Eric (1860–1925)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sinclair-eric-8435/text14827, accessed 5 January 2014.

(5). ibid.

(6). R.M Kaplan, ‘Freud’s Most Excellent Adventure Downunder: The Only Publication in Australia by the Founder of Psychoanalysis’, Australasian Psychiatry, 2010 Jun;18(3):205-9.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20482424

(7). ibid.

Janet Butler – Kitty’s War…. Book Review

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1910s, Australian Women Writers Book Reviews

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Janet Butler, Kitty’s War: The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2013. ( Reviewed also for the Australian Women Writer’s Challenge 2013).

I was lost inside this  book for several days. At random moments I found myself  thinking about Janet Butler’s ‘Nurse’, Kit, her daily life and her frequently harrowing experiences on the battlefields and hospitals of the Great War, all recorded in Butler’s book, Kitty’s War. I came to care about this woman who left Australia for a great adventure in 1915 and returned four years later ill, grieved, traumatized and, maybe, wiser. Certainly she was more assertive than the self-effacing Edwardian woman who left her family behind. My doorway into Kit’s world was with Butler’s opening sentences.( And here I must acknowledge Janine Rizzetti over at ‘The Resident Judge of Port Phillip’ who records a similar ‘first-sentence experience’).Butler writes:

Imagine, for a moment, that we are granted an eagle’s eye-view of the fields and villages, the roads and towns of northern France.  It is dusk on a mid-autumn evening.  This is the Western Front, one hundred and eighteen days after the beginning of Operations on the Somme…. (p. 1)

So imagine we do. We ride on the back of that eagle as it progresses through the days and nights, the battles and peaceful moments of Kit McNaughton’s life at the war. Butler’s source, Kit Mc Naughton’s war diary, was lent to her  by Kit’s family for this project. Kit’s thinking is revealed in her written words and in her silences and omissions. Throughout there is another voice, the historian who witnesses, comments and interprets. Butler is watching, assessing, aligning corroborative material to understand Kit’s changing sense of her place in the world. We do not enter Kit’s internal world as such but we are aware of its manifestations as she evolves from the rather sheltered 29-year-old woman from a small town called Little River in Victoria, Australia. Along with a contingent of nurses and soldiers, she set off  for an adventure on the Troopship, Orsova in 1915.Kit, a trained and experienced nurse, decides to write the diary as much as a letter home as anything else. It is a travelogue, a record of events and, as Butler observes, her writing reveals her consciousness of her place as a female within her social world at home, observing the conventions of proper conduct and family expectations. As the book proceeds ‘Kitty’ becomes ‘Kit’. Hers is both a physical journey – Kit was away from home for four years – and, potentially a voyage of discovery, a ‘Getting of Wisdom’. Or is it?

Butler writes,

For nurses travelling to war, the Anzac legend opens out the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Australian soldiers experienced a loss of identity as they entered training camps, left their individual civilian jobs, clothing and characteristics behind, and, as historian Bart Ziino points out in his ‘Journeys into War’ were informed that discipline meant the ‘sinking of the self for the good of the whole’. The experience of the nurses was directly opposite. They continued the work they did as civilians but their journey into war challenged and enabled them to expand and develop their sense of self. ( p. 18).

Kit begins with her observation of shipboard life. Here was a group of young men and women, freed from the social proprieties of  life at home. And as people do, they had sex with one another. Kit walks the fine line, too. She makes friends with someone called George, meets him at the various meeting places on board and observes during a trip to the boat deck with him that they ‘saw all the sights worth seeing – two that looked like one, etc.etc.’ Then as Butler notes, ‘Of course I was very good’. Kit is not one to reveal  her most private thoughts and actions, at least to an audience of readers back home.

We follow Kit first to Egypt where the opportunity to see the sights only ever read about and Kit’s first day on duty on the Island of Lemnos, where everything was in readiness for them was coloured by the fact that the nurses were not wanted – at Lemnos. They were undermined by the Officers who preferred the work done by untrained orderlies. Patients were not properly cared for. They were dirty, dishevelled and starving. Climactic conditions were harsh. The island, buffeted by winds was a death trap.Temperatures were low. It took months for warm clothes to be issued for the nurses. Some died, as did patients. Needlessly. Despite all this, Butler notes the silences in the diaries. Reluctance to complain, habits of self effacement and acceptance of one’s lot part and parcel of life at home meant that real need was not admitted to. After leaving Lemnos Kit contracted diphtheria, permanently damaging her heart.

Butler follows Kit to Cairo, for socializing and romance and eventually to The Somme where she nurses German wounded soldiers. Here she discloses some of the horror. She describes the gravity and severity of the wounds, of gas gangrene, amputations and suffering. She is trusted to operate , describing how she cut into a wound to retrieve  a bullet. Throughout she is aware that these men are on the other side, even as she owes a duty of care. She also comes to like them. Throughout Kit is supported by her friend Ida Mockridge. They are companions throughout the war. Such pairings were common amongst the nurses. They travelled together, were posted together and went home together. Butler’s account of the bonds of female friendship, part of life in the Victorian era, also suggests that these enabled survival, psychologically speaking.

After the Somme we accompany Kit into some of the most brutal battlefields on the Western Front. By this time Kit, along with her colleagues, are well able to assert themselves. No more are they the compliant self effacing martyrs that arrived in the middle east a couple of years back.

And the writing is superb. Butler is unflinching as she describes the conditions surrounding the hospital tents close to the front line – of bombs, bullets, and the cries of wounded men as they flooded into the hospitals. These are the places, later described by at least one writer in 1924 – a doctor treating war-traumatized veterans where the most brutal and crucial battles were fought.(1) Butler sustains her voice, weaving her story in and out of Kit’s diary. She uses the writings of Kit’s colleagues, her soldier friends, and that of the Matron in Charge to pull few punches about the relentless horror and madness of this war. She sympathises with Kit’s exhaustion and, without burrowing much into the psychological damage rendered by such experiences, and merely notes that these days Kit may well have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Psychoanalysis began to come into its own on these battlefields when doctors, treating battle traumatized soldiers among them, W H R Pitt Rivers,found that the ‘talking cure’, developed by Freud helped to heal those minds. One of the silences in Kit’s Diary, it appears, concerns these psychological processes. Perhaps ‘mental cases’ as Kit put it were outside her ambit, or were considered to be cases of malingering or cowardice, even as the medical journals were beginning to document cases of  shell shock as a hysterical condition. Kit also suffered from what she witnessed, from grief from losing her friends and comrades. On looking at  photographs taken before and after Kit went to war  Butler remarks upon the grief and pain shadowing Kit’s eyes in the ‘after’ photograph. Kit may not have felt the need for psychological assistance. Or may be she would have baulked at the idea, thinking it a weakness.

Butler’s account though, does much to contextualize the emergence of psychological understandings of trauma, loss and grief as well as apprehension of the usefulness of psychoanalytic therapies from doctors in the field. Perhaps Kit’s silence on the psychological impact of war also reflected wider perceptions of mental illness. Indeed the Australian Doctor John Springthorpe, whose main work was in insane asylums prior to leaving for the war, fought an uphill battle with the Australian Government’s   Repatriation Commission to have it accept war neurosis as grounds for disablement and the granting of war pensions. As Butler might note,  silence about the impact of war on nurses at the front may be continuing. Archival sources and journal articles describe the aetiology of war trauma on the men who returned from the front. And yet Kit who subsequently married after her return, also suffered from ill health and may well have died earlier than she would have had she not gone away.

This is an important book,a tale of one woman, told seamlessly and with compassion. It is a journey into war and into the psyche of a personage of another time and place, and yet one that is also part of our formation. It deserves a place alongside Pat Barker’s War Trilogy, Regeneration.

 

Reference: J P Lowson (1924), ‘Some points in the psychology of a nervous breakdown’, Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol.2, Issue 2, pp.113-132.

The Archbishop and the Queensland Girl…1916

06 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1910s, Australian History, Douglas Price, Queensland, Religious History, Reviews

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It looks tedious at first. Part of the dry stuff that goes into academic journals detailing nuances of cultural development and debate. Not that I object as such: I research and write history in my spare time. But the fight, in 1911 over doctrine between the Rector of All Saints Church in Brisbane, Douglas Price, and the Anglican Archbishop of Queensland, St Clair George Alfred Donaldson that threatened to diminish, if not extinguish Donaldson’s mission and authority is the stuff of drama and tragedy.The entire event was reported across the nation. It was the subject of a number of letters to the editor as observers struggled with the nature of Canon Law, the divinity of Christ and persons. For Price’s contention, that the divine rests within us all refused the divinity of God in and of itself. The Archbishop did not agree and asked for Price’s resignation at his own convenience. On 10 January 1911 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Archdeacon had stepped in to force Price’s immediate resignation.

Price was followed by a number of his congregation who eventually invited him to head a new church – the modernists. He eventually died in 1916. His followers attempted to keep the flame alive through a series of memorial lectures held between 1920 and 1924. After that he faded into obscurity.

Price was a writer, too. He published his sermons along with several novels in which he attempted to explore the mind of his subjects. One of a Crowd: The Story of a Queensland Girl Drawn Mainly From Life, published, it seems, just before his death in 1916, explores the nature of vocation and mission. It is a highly sympathetic portrait of a young woman finding her way – within herself – in contrast with those expectations of women were frequently limited to marriage and motherhood.  He begins with Karen Petri, a child orphaned and institutionalised at the age of five. But before this point she had already learned a central lesson as Price vividly portrays in this argument between two small children. Here he is also granting consciousness to small children – a new thing in those days – as well as his intention to study the growth of a young woman’s mind through her emotional experiences. Nature has its own place in Price’s work; its place is akin to Sophocles Greek chorus, explaining moods, moving the story forward. We live in relation to nature within and without. This is Price’s first chapter – in full.

It was her birthday, and she was three years old. The full tide of the day had come, and Noon, weary but victorious, lay basking in the garden, while the sun yawned lazily over the world, sleepy with sunshine, dreaming its dream of creaseless, incredible blue.

On this first day of her memories Karen Petri sat in the garden, all among the yellow daisies which June had dipped so lavishly in liquid gold. A little lizard, lithe and cunning, looked at her cautiously as it sunned its sacred body in the light. But she paid no heed to the lizard, she had something more interesting to do. She was singing softly to herself, and making imaginary tea in an old cracked teapot filled to the brim with sulphur coloured sand.

On either side of the teapot there were groups of quaint Chinamen everlastingly engaged in the drinking of invisible tea. Time wrote no wrinkle on their brows, nor as yet had aught disturbed the even tenor of their enamelled plasticity. Nevertheless, the Finger of Fate caught even now at the threads of their blameless existence.

Within the teapot’s glossy depths there was something cabalistic, occult; it was a well of mystery, lit by flashes of rare colour and richness of shade, with a glassy polish smoother even than the child’s own skin. Doubtless some fairy dwelt within this burnished cavern, by whose enchantments silver water was transmuted into amber tea.

Karen loved her teapot better than any doll, and upon rare occasions when she could surreptitiously fill it with real water her delight knew no bounds.

‘Tea, tea, beautiful tea,’ she  sang; and the breeze, drunk with pollen, caught her words contemptuously and scattered them into the air. Presently a step – O eyes of me! – a stranger: a small boy in a sailor suit, with a pink pugnose and a face flecked with freckles. His mother was calling on hers, and had bid him ‘run away and play’. He ran.

The gilded flowers beckoned him mysteriously, the brown bees sang their sweet songs of toil, the white fire fell from the sun, overhead a bird was calling to its mate; but the boy cared for none of these things.

He had secured a stone to sling at a butterfly when, suddenly he saw Karen. Their eyes met, and fell, and met again. Both were dumb, and the Spirit of Shyness sheltered them for a time. The Curiosity entered the garden, and whispered slyly to the boy.

‘What you got?’ he demanded.

‘Teapot’, she replied.

‘Give ‘um me’.

‘No’

‘Give ‘um me, I tell you. I’m older than you, an’ if you don’t I’ll grab it’.

‘You shan’t! You mustn’t touch it! Mine!’ Greed and fear began to form in their minds like hail in the heavens ready to fall.

The boy made a swoop, and Karen fled with her treasure clasped tightly in her hands.

In and out among the bushes he chased her impetuously, till her foot caught on a stone and she fell to the ground, winning scars on her forehead which she would carry to the grave. The teapot was shivered into nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces; its destiny was fulfilled and the Chinamen at last broke up their age-long party.

Then blood, screams, tears, hurrying footsteps and general consternation – while flowers looked coyly at the bees and the leaves murmured lovingly to the breeze, and the sun shone benignantly amid the everlasting splendour of the sky, caring no more for Karen and her woes than for the fly in the tent of the spider, or the bird in the clutches of the hawk.

”Tis ever so’. Even our prettiest dolls are stuffed with sawdust. We cling to things that make us happy till someone stronger than ourselves snatches them from us, or causes us to shatter them to bits.

Thus did Karen first encounter Ahriman, all beneath the shining of the sun.

Karen is orphaned and institutionalised – subject to the whims of adults for whom she works as a servant before she enters a convent – for a time. Her musical ability – her singing and playing the piano sustain her as she leaves the religious life and moves to the city to work and music lessons. Price reveals the human underside of the religious life – Karen is no more a servant to the Mother Superior and her assistant than she was before. After an overseas voyage to London with them she is sent back to Australia, alone, although she befriends the author on this return journey.  Finally there is love and marriage and retreat to an idyllic Garden of Eden island in Northern Queensland. Still, Karen struggles…

She had made so many changes, had been uprooted so often before, that she felt confident of being able to adapt herself to the new conditions. Love had brought her an immense happiness, but would it really solve the secret of life? Already she was conscious there was a great part of herself which she could not give to the impetuous Basil, and that with some of her sympathies and thoughts he would probably have but little sympathy.

This troubled her a good deal, for in the books she had read, love was pictured as leading to a perfect understanding, and she wondered whether she herself were at fault. The sacrifice of a possible artistic career had seemed to her no light thing, but Basil had waved it aside almost unfeelingly. He appeared, man-like, to regard himself as her deliverer, whereas to her it was an offering she had made solely for his sake.

But what did these things matter in the presence of the great dream of love? Doubtless they were not very important; nevertheless they were present as a slight dischord, like the occasional whizzing of the wire on the G string, when some masterpiece is played on the violin. Fortunately this feeling was only audible to herself. Never for a moment did she contemplate speaking of it to Basil.

Karen’s inner vitality remains hidden, even as she and her husband, explore the physical bounds of their small island. It is a ‘conceit’, a device among many that occur in this book as Price develops his theme – the nature of the divine within – that a storm occurs…when Basil, along with a group of Aboriginal fisherman, disappear in a huge storm while out at sea. Karen is left entirely alone. The dead body of a wood-pigeon washes at her feet.

Then it was that she  remembered her loneliness upon the island. basil, perhaps might never come back. At first she felt stunned and incapable of realisation. She almost wanted to laugh. 

Karen passes through periods  of fear, desolation. She is terrified her mind will give way before reaching the solace of tears before reaching a realisation, and perhaps Price’s central thesis:

Were all her prayers and her tears emptied into bottomless space, and cast like dead lumber into the abyss? No. No. She knew better than that. Somewhere she had read that the true God is within the wise man’s heart. If that were so, she must try to be brave, for help was within herself, she must not give way to outrageous fears.

With a great effort of the will she tried to control her mind. ‘Come, come’, she said to herself, “I will not be a fool. I will be brave and practical and wise. Whatever happens, I can face it calmly, and just now I was acting like a silly child’.

Almost immediately she became conscious of her strength, and though she still had to hold back her fears as with an almost physical force, she slowly gained the mastery over herself, and by sheer commonsense beat back the thickest battalions of dismay.

The power to help ourselves is ever within, That night she discovered her strength, Robbed of every other consolation, she found the spirit of true divinity in herself. It was then, in a sense, that she came of age; and she knew she could never again feel so helpless as hitherto. It is only in the soul that great things happen, and some of us have to be dipped in the deepest pits of calamity before we discover the fortitude of our real and innermost self. After that discovery we are never quite so feeble again.

Perhaps from the little we know of Price’s story this is autobiographical. Perhaps it is a sermon, veiled as a novel, designed for posterity, outside the censorship of the good bishop. Something beautiful shattered.

 

 

Dream Theories

01 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in 1910s, South Australia: Newspapers

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One of the first reports of Freud’s work and writings in Australia…

The Register, Adelaide, Thursday 4 May 1911, p.4. According to the newer theories of dreams, that which we perceive in a dream is a symbol. Professor Sigmund Freud, of Vienna, holds that behind the symbolism of dreams there lies ultimately a wish: and he believes that this wish is tinged by elements that go back to the dreamer’s infantile days. As Freud views the mechanism of dreams it is far from exhibiting a disordered mental activity, but is the outcome of a wish or a desire, which is driven back by a kind pf inhibition or censure, and is seeking new forms of expression. Thus, in Freud’s view, we never dream of anything without wishing in some irregular conscious or subconscious way to do so. This theory is not accepted without reserve by other psychologists, who urge that just as some unrelated picture or scene—observed perhaps many years ago— sometimes appear on the surface of consciousness, so may dream images arise. Such images come to the surface of consciousness as unexpectedly or disconnectedly as a minute bubble might arise and break on the surface of an actual stream from old organic material silently disintegrating in the depths beneath. The slight disintegration or alteration of a minute cell in the brain would produce a similar effect sleeping or waking.