Category Archives: 1920s

How Kalgoorlie Gold Miners Began Learning About Psychoanalysis

19 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in 1920s, historical source material, western australia

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One of the reasons for starting this blog was an interest in exploring the influence of psychoanalytic ideas in this part of the world: Australia and the Oceania region. The advent of the National Library of Australia’s data base, TROVE, and the link to Australia’s digitized newspaper collection has enabled an ease of research by laptop rather than making the physical journey to spend hours trawling through ancient newspapers. How this might shape the way history is developed and written will be interesting to see.

In the 1910s and 1920s – the interwar years – in the sprawling country that was settler Australia, with so many people living a long way from anywhere that resembled a city, interest in culture, whether politics, literature, science and philosophy could be hardly restricted to metropolitan newspapers and readers. Regional and local newspapers, depending upon the interests of their editors and readers, reported widely on literary and scientific events and thinking. Local papers generally confined reportage to political, economic and local news with a serial thrown in. With contributions from people with particular expertise, newspapers across the country reflect the diverse interests amongst Australian people. Freud’s name was well enough known by 1938 that the process of his escape from Europe was reported on a daily basis in numerous local papers across the country as well as in the metropolitan and regional press.  So too was his death a year later. So what is the result when ‘Psychoanalysis’ is typed into the search engine.

A little research was needed. Using the word ‘psychoanalysis’ as my tool, I undertook a little survey of the TROVE digitized newspaper site. I used the year dates: from 1920 to 1929. In this period 1126 ‘articles’ were found from a total of 769 digitized newspapers. The total number of articles concerning psychoanalysis for the entire archive, dating from 1803 to 2007, is 2941. Other words could be used, such as ‘Freud’,  ‘Psychotherapy’, ‘Psychology’ and ‘Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy’ and may yield different articles which will add to the store of items available.  The point here, though, is that during the early part of the twentieth century news of Freud and his work, transmitted through the print media, reached a far into remote Australia as well as finding a more likely audiences living in the metropolitan areas. 

Now, to content. Inevitably some writers will be critical of psychoanalysis and its method; others, admiring of Freud and his work wish to recommend it . There was also reportage of lectures and educational events: Workers Educational Association lectures were a major forum for lectures about psychoanalysis. From 1923 a new venture, the formation of the Australian Society for Psychology and Philosophy by University of Sydney’s  Professor Sir Francis Anderson began attracting interested and critical readers – also from places hundreds of miles from Sydney.  Between August 1923 and March 1924 the Capricornian a weekly newspaper in Rockhampton, a town in Northern Queensland, published four items of over 1000 words centred upon the introduction of the Association’s new journal, The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. and within this, exploring responses to the new science of psychoanalysis. Not so the the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate, a regional paper serving Newcastle, north of Sydney. Nevertheless who, from the perspective of early twenty-first century urban Australia, would guess that at this time in the early 1920s, that in a place as remote and as rugged as the ‘frontier’ mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, that the topic of psychoanalysis would have even rated a mention?

 Kalgoorlie, some 370 miles from Perth, was begun as a miner’s camp in 1893 when gold was discovered. It was declared as a town in 1895. It was and remains small enough population-wise. Wikipedia, that ever reliable source, suggests that Kalgoorlie’s population was about 2000 by 1899, increasing to 6000 by 1903, or so. Census data from the 2011 collection show Kalgoorlie’s population to be 13,949. This little film compiled from photographs at Western Australia’s State Library with commentary by Don Pugh, is a glimpse into the conditions in which the early settlers were living.

Perhaps it is reflective of the randomness and the sporadic way in which psychoanalytic ideas were spread globally. Or perhaps it shows how dispersed the population was as well as the reliance of many people upon the written word for information about the world about them. In the 1920s newspapers were the main form of mass communication, if not for many people, the only form.  Fortune seekers on the Kalgoorlie goldfields may also have been medical practitioners or lawyers or indeed, Oxford Dons before going off to try their luck.

 Between 1920 and 1929 Kalgoorlie’s daily, the Kalgoorlie Miner, published twenty articles where psychoanalysis was a key work, if not subject. In contrast with the  metropolitan papers, The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Argus which published 65 and 46 items, this is a surprisingly high number.  South Australian daily, Adelaide’s Advertiser published 92 items during the same period while Perth’s two papers, the West Australian and the Western Mail published 90 items between them during the same period. One would expect more articles on the subject to have been published in the larger metropolitan areas of Sydney and Melbourne, both, at one time, Australian government centres.

The material is not lightweight. On 1 February 1921 readers of the Kalgoorlie Miner found this little item headed, “What Psychoanalysis is Doing”. Here is the full text.

Since Freud began his searching and patient investigation of the unconscious mind, over twenty five years ago, a constantly increasing number of psychologists, mental physicians, and educational reformers have found it necessary to reconsider a number of problems associated with the conscious activity of the mind in health and disease.

It is not too much to say that psycho-analysis has revealed the springs of human behaviour in an entirely new light, and that its discoveries are of an epoch-making character. The practical results are indisputable in the cure of hysterical affections and those mental and physical symptoms that have been classed loosely under the description ‘neurasthenia.’

Psycho-analysis, as practised by ardent and highly-qualified physicians in military and civil hospitals during the war, relieved a very large number of sufferers from states of morbid dread, acute mental depression, loss of memory, and obsessional ideas. The treatment provides a means for which physicians have sought for generations, and the proof of its efficacy is shown to-day by the host of people who have been released from some of the keenest emotional torture experienced by humanity.

At a period in civilisation when the difficulty of adjustment to conditions that conflict with deep primal instincts induces an enormous amount of nervous and mental disturbance, psycho-analysis brings a healing boon to mankind. The menace to mental sanity, and frequently the physical health, is not invariably present in the consciousness. It was through an analysis of a patient’s unconscious mind, as revealed in dreams, that Freud, became deeply impressed by the part that the unconscious plays in the causation of hysteria, abnormal fears, and impulsions of a morbid character. 

Psycho-analysis, as Dr. H. Coriot says, ‘bears the same relation in all its principles to the human mind, and to social consciousness, as bio logy does to the organic world.’ Many difficult social and moral questions become plainer through a knowledge of the unconscious mind. Psycho-analysis supplies an explanation for forgetfulness, slips of the, tongue and the pen, and many of our puzzling weaknesses and strange deep-rooted prejudices. It is not possible to describe the technique of the system in a few words. The cure of mental illness comes through ‘transference, a  feeling of acknowledged sympathy towards the physician such as is noted in all medical practice when the patient relies on the wisdom or the doctor. This is not ‘falling in love with the doctor.’ as suggested by some critics. Any demonstration of that kind would put an end to the treatment. I recommend interested persons to read ‘What is Psycho-analysis?’ by Dr. Coriot; ‘The Freudian Wish’ by Holt; and ‘Man’s Unconscious Conflict,’ by Dr. Lay.

Perhaps it should not be so surprising that such interest and vigorous thinking about intellectual and cultural issues is so easily demonstrable at this time in Australian history. Or probably anywhere for that matter. But Australia at this time had just dried the ink on its own constitution signed in 1901. It was leading the world in some political and social spheres. White women had gained the right to vote, beginning in 1895 in South Australia with New South Wales Women achieving this in 1908, well ahead of the United Kingdom where women’s suffrage was not achieved until the late  1920s. It’s welfare reforms, particularly in the field of state children, were well regarded. From the late nineteenth century, in several states the ‘boarding out’ of state children was internationally recognized as the ‘Australian System’. In 1916 workers in Victoria had won a long and hard battle, commenced in 1856, for the 8 hour working day: 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep and 8 hours leisure and would be achieved nationally during the 1920s. Some interesting research is yet to be done.

 

References:-

1921 ‘WHAT PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IS DOING.’, Kalgoorlie Miner (WA : 1895 – 1950), 1 February, p. 3, viewed 19 August, 2014, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article92883739

Edwin B Holt (1915) , The Freudian wish and its place in ethics, New York, Henry Holt and Company. https://archive.org/stream/freudianwishitsp00holtiala#page/n1/mode/2up  (accessed 18 August 2014).

Wilfrid Lay (1917), Man’s unconscious conflict: a popular exposition of psychoanalyis, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company; https://archive.org/stream/mansunconsciousc00laywiala#page/n5/mode/2up (accessed 18 August 2014)

 


Psychoanalysis in early 1920s Queensland

02 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1920s, Newspaper reportage

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On 17 February 1923 an announcement appeared in Rockhampton’s major newspaper, the Morning Mail. A local medical practitioner, Dr Wynne was to speak at the School of Arts on the subject of ‘Modern Medicine’.  The lecture was to be

a brief non-technical account of facts not generally known which are profoundly changing the conception of the human machine, including psychoanalysis.

Clearly the organisers were confident that the good citizens of Rockhampton would be interestedenough to attend. Rockhampton in Central Coastal Queensland appears to be about as far as one could get from the southern centres of culture and intellect, Melbourne and Sydney, let alone Europe. Founded in 1861, it grew to become a major shipping port with easy access to the Pacific and Asia. With prosperity came thoughts that Rockhampton would be the capital of Queensland. And, not least the Morning Bulletin, reflecting the social and cultural pursuits of its citizens, not only published notices and reports of lectures held by the various educational and cultural societies, but also editorial comment.  Psychoanalysis was a particular favourite: unlike their colleagues in Northern Queensland who published items critical of Freud’s ideas, Rockhampton editors were curious.

So far the few histories of psychoanalysis in Australia have focussed on events and trends in the capital cities. No doubt the omission of regional and country interest is due to the practical difficulty of wading through piles of newspapers from such remote places as Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, Broken Hill in far west New South Wales as well as Rockhampton. Such places are about as far as one can get from Europe as well as major Australian cities. Like Philip Le Couteur  at the University of Western Australia they tried to describe psychoanalysis to readers, to explain its meaning and usefulness. The desire of writers of the history of psychoanalysis  to bed down a story of psychoanalytic thought  and practice in Australia, either with a complement of  pioneers, or arguing psychoanalysis really began with the arrival of the training analyst, Clara Geroe, from Hungary in 1940 is also pertinent.

There was no lack of information. Books, journals, articles and pamphlets  imported from Europe- about psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and science, education – were  advertised and reviewed in the press. Scholars left Australia in search of an education and returning with news of doings abroad – even if these were buried in newspaper columns. By the late 1890s, as historian Rod Kirkpatrick has shown, most, if not all country towns in New South Wales had their own newspaper All the colonies had their own share of local and regional papers as well as several dailies in each of the capital cities. Editors knew what was going on in their town. They knew who was who, they ensured they were invited to events, large and small. They talked to the townsfolk. In the quest for copy, reporters covered everything from childrens’ music exam results, public meetings and lectures as well as the politics of the day. Contributors ranged from local clergymen and missionaries to reporters using shorthand to record a lecture for those who did not arrive. Newspapers – state, regional and local – received  cables from a central international news service. It is not unusual to see a word for word report on one European event or another in several papers across the country.

In January 1924 ‘An Interview with Freud’ appeared in The Capricornian, republished in full from Popular Science magazine. 1200 words long, it detailed the meaning of psychoanalysis and described its principles – about the civilisability of the self-  for readers. Clearly this editor was confident enough of his readership to publish it.

‘Psychoanalysis is a science that leads man through the mazes of his own subconscious where the repressed desires, the fabulous monsters lie in ambush’, the article, the result of a long night’s talk with Freud, began.

Professor Freud said: ‘Modern psychology has discovered the ego is not the lord of his own domain. We are neither the captains of our souls nor the masters of our fate. Far from dominating our thoughts by the exercise of free will, we do not even know the mysterious tenants that inhabit our unconscious selves. Psychoanalysis, with infinite labour, succeeds in making us dimly conscious of the motives that sway us, of the blind instincts, often savage anc criminal, that shape our minds and determine our decisions’.

Psychoanalysis deals largely with sex, Freud continued. ‘Sex is the root and the fruit of the tree of life; it is also its blossom’…Psychoanalysis ‘teaches us that we never entirely overcome the animal, the savage, the criminal or the child in ourselves’.

Readers learned how a baby passes through all the phases of evolution; that every child is a savage; that every human perversity is part of normal development and that ‘psychic shocks’ received in babyhood, inhibit a man’s normal development in whole or in part’. If we deny the sex life of a child, Freud holds, we deny nature itself.

Settler Australians were acutely conscious of the presence of indigenous people, if only to remark upon their absence. Aboriginal people were believed to have ‘died away’, if not tucked away on the missions.  In Social Darwinist terms,the ‘lowest on the racial scale,civilisability of Aboriginal people had been debated issue for much of the previous century. In 1924 Queensland, like New South Wales and Western Australia, was adopting policies of removing Aboriginal children from their parents, focussing on those with an ‘admixture’ of European heritage, in an effort to preserve the purity of the white race.  Freud’s notion of the savage within, so clearly articulated here for a general readership, not to mention its circulation in professional and academic circles, would have been confronting for good citizens believing they had mastery. This is what they read:

Civilisation, in self-defence, teaches us to forget, to deny the disguise, to repress, or to ‘ sublimate ‘ our criminal instincts. However, it cannot banish them completely. They crop out under certain circumstances in the most staid, the most respectable individual. They are responsible for curious contradictions in our nature. They explain why the same individual may be both cruel, and kind, selfish and generous, voluptuous and austere, depending upon the conscious or unconscious forces at sway. They betray themselves, if not to us, to the trained investigator. They subtly colour our thoughts, they generate our dreams, they enter in one form or another into every activity…

The struggle of repression absorbs a vast amount of our energy that could be directed into more useful channels. It explains the tardiness of human progress. Driven from the conscious mind, the repressed desire finds other outlets. Unaccountable nervous maladies, hysterias, neuroses, curious twitching of the face or the fingers, inexplicable obsessions, like Dr. Johnson’s mania to touch every lamppost, are merely [some] gestures of repressed desires. We read of a good man gone wrong. The very fact that he guarded his nether nature so carefully gave volcanic force to its eruption. The force of the explosion stands in a definite ratio to the degree of repression. Repressed wishes unable to escape cause… emotional and nervous ulcers, drawing strength from the healthy tissues surrounding them. Just as tumours, of which we are unaware, influence our physical wellbeing and react upon our emotional life, so tumours of the mind exercise a baneful influence over our physical and mental activities, even if we are blissfully unaware of their existence.

In future years Rockhampton people would host educators and lecturers from the University of Queensland and other places who sought to explain psychology and psychoanalysis to them. And through learning about these activities we can speculate just how closely settler Australian aligned their cultural and intellectual interests with those of the home country.

Psychoanalysis and Northern Queensland -1925

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1920s, Conferences and Lectures, historical source material, New Psychology, Newspaper reportage, Press, public education, Queensland, settler culture

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I found this item in the Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, Queensland.

The date: 21 August 1925.

Professor Scott-FIetcher, from the University of Queensland, delivered a public lecture in tho Mount Morgan Technical College on Wednesday night on “Recent Developments of Psychology.” The chair was occupied by the Mayor of Mt. Morgan (Alderman A, P. Bedsor).

Mount Morgan is a town located in central Queensland, Australia. It is situated on the Dee River, 38 kilometres south of the city of Rockhampton, and is 680 kilometres north of the state capital, Brisbane. It is far enough away, one presumes – from a twenty-first century perspective – for the newly emerging disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis to be of little interest to people. Yet the National Library’s digitized newspaper collection, enabling an easy and closer look at the material at hand, reveals quite the opposite. From the 1920s Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin frequently published items about psychoanalysis – in favour and not. Along with the Barrier Hill Miner in Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie‘s daily newspaper along with those of the state capital cities, it is possible to see that there was widespread and lively interest in this ‘New Psychology’ as it was called, from the early decades of the twentieth century.

Let us listen to the reporter’s account of Professor Scott-Fletcher’s address. He clearly enjoyed it.

“In the course of a very fine address, the lecturer said that psychology was the science which investigated all mental states, normal end abnormal Some years ago the subject was mainly studied as an introduction to philosophy but during this century psychology had made great advances as an independent science. Moat universities had a laboratory, in which, by means of experiments, it was possible to test general intelligence, memory, and perceptual ability. The study of the mental equipment of animals had shown that instinct in human beings was one of the main factors in behaviour. The professor then described how the discovery of the unconscious mental processes in man had opened up an immense field of research. The application of these results to education, mental disorders, and even business efficiency had been attended with great success.”

“The use of psychoanalysis by Freud was next described. The lecturer explained that the undue prominence given to sex in this method had led to several new developments, in which Jung, Adler, and Bjerre had by other methods, successfully treated pathological cases due to mental maladaptation to environment. Psychology, while deterministic in theory, yet aimed in its practical applications nt securing freedom for the individual by making his actions self-determined.”

“At the close of the lecture the professor very lucidly answered a number of questions; asked by members of the audience. The lecture, was greatly appreciated by a good audience, and a hearty vote of thanks was accorded the lecturer”.

Professor Scott-Fletcher was New Zealand born and. according to his obituary published in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail on 7 November 1947, took his Master of Arts degree at Sydney University in 1902. He won the University Medal for Philosophy. He became the Master of King’s College at the University of Queensland in 1912 and, in 1916 was appointed to Wesley College at the University of Sydney where he also tutored on philosophy. He was appointed as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in 1922 and resigned in 1938. At the time of his death he was 79 years of age.

There may be, of course, more to learn about the Professor.   You can contact me via freudinoceania[at]gmail[dot]com  if you would like to add to this.

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS: A Doctor’s Warning – 1924

08 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1920s, Australian History, Conferences and Lectures, historical source material, Lay analysis, Medical circles, NSW, Press, Public debate, Sydney

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By the early 1920s public interest in psychoanalysis in Australia was broad, and certainly not restricted to medical circles. The president of the Victorian branch of the British Medical Association, Dr L.S. Latham used his retiring speech to warn that psychoanalysis should not be utilised indiscriminately. At the very least, he argued,  psychoanalysis should be practised ‘under skilled medical direction’. It is clear that there was sufficient interest for the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald  to publish Latham’s speech in the edition of 1 January 1924. Here is the text:

“The widespread and general interest in psycho-analysis is to be viewed with some concern. I am anxious not to indulge in cheap criticism, but it may be pointed out (what should be clear to anyone who has practised with any concentration psycho- logical method of introspection) that there are many pitfalls to be avoided in a logical tracing out of psychological associations. Follow a train of thought in your own mind and the associations are frequently most difficult to connect. The ideas would appear to be associated in time, but in little else.

Psycho-analysis affords by the “word association tests” a valuable means of examination of mind and determining the lines along which association tends to occur, but recognition of the occasional value of this method is consistent with the view that it should be but rarely applied, and that the Freudian symbolic interpretation of many phenomena thus observed need not be endorsed. The efforts of ancient philologists In derivations such as faba, fabaricus (fab-aricot-us) (h) aricot, and mus muris (mu-rat-us) rat, are ingenuous and simple in comparison with some of the psycho-analytic symbolisms.

Probably the whole profession makes use from time to time of suggestion, and many of our patients need above all things inspiration or, it may be, comfort, and these constitute a form of psycho-therapy.

It should be strongly emphasised that In cases of nervous disease psycho-analytic methods should not be employed by non-medical exponents alone, even though they may be expert psychologists, for it is necessary before application of such methods that the presence of organic disease liable to be aggravated by the employment of such methods be first excluded. Such conditions aro encephalitis and other inflam- matory states. Of course, the ideal method would be that persons suitable for this method of investigation should be handled by an expert psychologist in association with skilled medical direction”.

 

 

Making Wayward Children Wise Citizens – Sydney Feminsts and Psychoanalysis in the 1920s

26 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1920s, Child Study, Feminism, NSW

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Writing on behalf of the National Council for Women for in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Women’s Column of 15 June 1921 Maybanke Anderson set out a  proposal for the development Child Study circles for women. ‘Increasing understanding of psychoanalysis, and all that it involves, may, if women choose to study it and compare notes have an inestimable effect on future generations’. Hopefully ‘if every mother knows how to make a wayward child into a wise citizen our gaols and asylums might, in one generation, be converted into playgrounds’. She invited interested women to the first meeting at 3 o’clock the following Friday.

It was probably inevitable that Maybanke, born in 1845, whose activism  on behalf of women and children since the early 1890s, would make this link between psychoanalysis and child study. Interest in psychoanalysis was remarkably widespread across Australia during these immediate  years after the end of the Great War.  Perusal of the National Library’s Digital Newspaper collection shows that lectures and literature about psychoanalysis drew much interest – not just in the capital cities but in centres as far afield as Northern Queensland, and the far west of New South Wales. There was, of course, the realisation that  shell-shock could be treated using psychoanalytic techniques,  practiced by members of the medical fraternity.

During the 1890s Maybanke Anderson had been a suffragette and,in 1894 founded her own paper, Woman’s Voice  to promote reforming ideas about the rights of women and children. Her friends and associates of that time included a number of significant women reformers –  Rose Scott, Lady Mary Windeyer and her daughter, Margaret,  Louisa Lawson, and  Dora Montefiore. In 1896 when she was a campaigner for womens’ rights she and her colleagues had begun  the world’s first free kindergarten in the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo, She continued working with the Free Kindergarten Union well into the second decade of the twentieth century.Her marriage to Francis Anderson, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1899 also brought her into contact with the university world.  Francis Anderson’s associate, the psychologist H Tasman Lovell was a particular admirer and friend. He had been charged with developing the first experimental psychology course, including the study of psychoanalysis at the University. Maybanke’s experience with children included teacher training and a period running her own school, Maybanke College in the early to mid 1880s. She was mother to seven children from her first marriage to Edmund Wolstenholme in 1876. Only two  survived to adulthood.

It seems that the take-up of psychoanalytic – and psychological – ideas by women and women’s groups in Australia at this time has not been documented. I cannot find much on this, even though the most recent published history of psychoanalysis in Australia, Joy Damousi’s 2005  Freud in the Antipodes has pointed to the work of the professors at various Australian Universities, and to the significance of the medical fraternity in the development of this arena. Yet women, such as Maybanke, were beginning to argue that as mothers and as educators the understanding of the inner world of the child was as important as physical care.

Maybanke’s book, Mother-Lore, published in 1919, written in the form of an advice manual, picked up notions from the ‘New Psychology’ and from the Child Study Associations  active in Sydney at the time.  In her book she was  concerned not with the physical, bodily care of children – there were plenty of such tomes,  but with the parents’ responsibility to care for the developing minds of their children. She wrote in common language, eschewing technical, psychological terms. Her message was for mothers – and fathers. Maybanke’s argument was that the child’s mind is something that is to be understood nurtured and developed. Children were not miniature adults, nor primitives to be trained in the ways of civilisation but sentient beings learning about themselves in the world. Far from utilising stringent measures as those promulgated by  New Zealander Dr Truby King, (was she having a  swipe at him when she remarked that few doctors were concerned about the developing mind of the baby?) famed for his advocacy of the strictly timed, four hourly feed, Maybanke Anderson  underlined the significance of the maternal/ parental relationship for the growing child. Her account of infant and child development is based  upon careful observation and experience. Maybanke directs her reader’s attention to the developing baby – born blind and deaf,  she asserts in the early chapters. She alerts readers to the babe’s exploration of self  – of arms, legs, hands, toes and fingers but also notes the child’s developing emotional life. She notes that patterns established in early childhood continue for life,  fears, lies, instincts and education. For twentyfirst century readers it is a glimpse into the common problems of child-rearing and notions of citizenship in middle-class English- Australian life during the early 1920s.  A baby has a brain, of course, she wrote. It is the mother’s task and responsibility to direct and help the child to develop.

Overall Maybanke seems to be groping, if not reaching for the notion that the mother’s/parents capacity for attunement and recognition of the babe’s gesture is central to the child’s  sense of becoming.  Her writing is powerfully clear.

Note how the energetic child may become a lazy man. His small endeavours to construct were burned as rubbish, or swept away because they littered the floor. He hurt his fingers with the hammer and we denied him the result of his experiments and hid the tool he longed to use. He cut the furniture with his little saw and scratched the floor with his chisel so we took them both away, not remembering that training he got by his endeavours would be of more use than the polish of the furniture and the tidiness of the floor. He was a troublesome boy, always wanting to do something. So we sent him to school early; and there all the work was talking and reading, he learned that work with the hands was degrading rather than ennobling, and that, if he wanted to be a gentleman he must wear a stiff collar and a good coat. So at length with his bright enthusiasm killed, he learned to sit still and smother his instincts, and the world lost an inventor, and gained a draper’s assistant. If it were not so common we would think it a tragedy. ( Mother-Lore, pp 17-18).

As a representative of the National Women’s Council Maybanke could have been following the lead of other women’s organisations in Sydney. It may be that some of its members also attended a lecture on psychoanalysis and war trauma given by Ethel Mortimer Langdon at the Women’s Club. In October 1920, the Feminist Club sponsored a lecture on psychoanalysis by Ruby Rich,who had just returned to Sydney after eight years away, some of these,  a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, said, spent studying ‘under Freud in Switzerland’. Perhaps this was an error… Switzerland was the place where  Carl Jung, Freud’s former protegé, was located. Rich’s lecture described as captivating by its listeners, was  followed by a second lecture. Both were repeated. A month later Ruby Rich announced her intention to ‘form a study circle on the subject of psychoanalysis under the aegis of the Feminist Club’. Apparently the Club continued its interest in mental health matters. On 9 February 1921 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that  the Feminist Club had passed a motion urging the re-centering of   ‘the clinic of psychiatry’ in general hospital work, and not be carried out by the Lunacy Department’.The Club paid especial attention to children. It included a clause ‘that special provision should be made for children temporarily mentally affected under the aegis of the work of this (hospital) clinic’.

Psychiatry was not Maybanke Anderson’s field. Her’s was education, in kindergartens and schools.  It is clear though, that in the immediate post-war years that she and her colleagues were working together, albeit following different threads of thought – to advocate for the development of psychological services within their particular communities of parents and children. For them psychoanalysis – and psychology –  held ideas that should not remain exclusive, confined within the portals of the medical fraternity. They had a place in the broader community to be used for its development.

THE PSYCHOGALVANOMETER – Can Emotions be Measured?

11 Saturday Aug 2012

Posted by in 1920s, Apparatus

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In my wanderings around the archives I have discovered a machine that purpots to measure emotions. It is called a Psychogalvanometer. When I learned that this critical piece of equipment was an essential feature of Western Australia’s Psychological Clinic, kept in the cupboard in the clinic’s Analysis Room, the psychogalvanometer became worthy of a post in itself.

The Mirror  (Perth, Western Australia) Saturday 22 November 1930, p.1.

It had its uses. In his lecture to the Sydney branch of the Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy in October 1929, ( and reported in The Sydney Morning Herald 11 Oct 1929) psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Roy Coupland Winn explained that the machine had ‘evolved’ in the Psychology Department at the University of Sydney. In experiments with patients with spinal chord injuries, Winn had found, he said, ‘that patients suffering from complete anaesthesia due to organic changes such as follow injury…to the spinal chord gave no psycho-galvanic response following pin-pricks in the anaesthetic area. On the other hand, in cases such as hysterical amnesia or of malingering, a response always followed stimulation of an area stated to be anaesthetic’. Anything that causes emotion will give the psycho-galvanic reflex’.

The psychogalvanometer was a delicate and expensive piece of equipment. An article: ‘Some new apparatus for the psycho-galvanic reflex phenomenon’, composed conjointly by a team from the Department of Psychology at the University of Sydney and published by the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy in 1928 described its workings in detail. Too long to publish here, the article was written by electronics experts, outlining its construction, the flow of electricity as it reacted to the subjects skin secretions as they altered and varied in response to their state of arousal.  The machine was expensive,  in need of constant adjustment but through the work of the team at the Department of Psychology it was, potentially, a useful instrument for the assessment of the true emotional states of respondents.

The machine linked mind and body and, it was supposed, enabled objectivity. It conceivably occupied the gap between the respective subjectivity of patient and doctor. This was what psychology was about, it seems, the gathering of evidence, and measurement.It aimed to exclude subjectivity.

For historians it is a glimpse into the what was assumed to be important and what was not; into early twentieth century British middle class sensibility.  The authors explained:

A list of twenty words was made, so selected that ten might be classed by a normal person as tinged with emotional tone, and ten of no emotional significance to a normal person. These words were arranged in six groups, as follows:
Group I: Table, light, house, cloud.
Group II: Bible, holy, religion, to sin.
Group I I I : Bird, dog, day.
Group IV: Man, woman, love.
Group V: Knife, clock, pencil.
Group VI: Kiss, family, anxiety.

It will be seen that Groups II, IV and VI are composed of words which for most people are accompanied by some considerable degree of emotional tone, while Groups I, III and V consist of words which have for most people, so far as can
be judged, very little emotional significance. In addition to the words, three stimuli were used which might be classed as nocive or threatening; these were: (a) a loud sound immediately behind the subject; (b) a pinprick in the back of subject’s neck; (c) the application of a small piece of moist sponge to the back of subject’s neck.
These stimuli might reasonably be expected to arouse some emotional response, whether of fear, anger, curiosity, or amusement. The subjects were required to respond with a free association in each case to the twenty stimulus words, and the
galvanometric deflections and reaction times were recorded in each case.

There was a series of questions:

An attempt was made to discover whether the act of making a voluntary choice between two alternatives would cause significant galvanometric deflections. Cards were shown to the subject one at a time, first setting before him a definite situation in which he was to imagine himself, and then offering the choice of two alternatives, between which the subject was to choose. In the case of two of the choices the subject was asked to reverse his decision, and in all cases the time and deflections were recorded.
The cards used were typed as follows:
1. (a) The hour is late, and the day has been tiring; you are about to take the tram home, when suddenly you discover that you have lost your money.
1. (b) Would you choose to walk the distance home, or risk explaining your quandary to some decent looking stranger ?

2. (a) You are preparing to attend a social gathering at a home not previously visited.
2. (b) Would you prefer to go in evening dress, with a chance of being made conspicuous, or in ordinary dress, and perhaps feel out of place?

3. (a) You are convalescing; it is your first day out of doors, and the weather is bright but cool.
3. (b) Would you prefer to sit in the sun in an uncomfortable chair, or in the shade in a comfortable one ?
3. (c) Now endeavour to make a reversal of your choice, and arrive at a contrary decision.

4. (a) On returning home after making a purchase you discover that you have been given more goods than you paid for.
4. (b)They would never be missed, and their return involves the dismissal of the employee responsible. Would you return or retain them ?
5. (a) You have invited out to dine a new acquaintance, whom you wish to impress favourably.
5. (b) On finding you have forgotten your money, would you rather borrow from your companion, or risk the unpleasantness of an explanation to the management, to whom you are personally unknown?

It must be admitted, the authors concluded, the psychogalvanometer ‘does register some emotional changes. Physiological investigations have confirmed what was once surmised, that changes in the amount of discharge by the sweat glands are responsible for the deflections. For this reason it is desirable to know
what emotions actually do cause such changes, but this fact is at present unknown’.

Nevertheless, the authors noted:

we hold to the point of view that  the psychogalvanic reflex does not register all emotions, for the “obstructed” situation of an attempted reversal of volition yields facial changes and bodily movements expressive of stirred-up mental conditions, far more pronounced than either free association responses or the act of volition itself. While of undoubted usefulness as one method of recording certain emotional change or changes, it does not appear that the psychogalvanic reflex may be regarded as a universal recorder of emotion. It ranks as a most important member among a number of methods of measuring somatic changes, but does not obviate other methods such as afforded by the pneumograph the cardiograph or manometer.

It seems that the authors conceded that subjectivity was difficult to measure, if not impossible.

Nevertheless the psychoanalyst Roy Coupland Winn found some use for the machine in his psychotherapeutic practice. It saved time, he wrote. ‘Supplying as it does objective evidence of emotional changes, it aids in the recognition of ” complexes “. He continued,

By having the patient attached to the psychogalvanometer during the recital of his experiences, or during free-association, a continuous indicator of emotion is provided. Owing to the common tendency of neurotics to adopt the method of facile superficial associations as a defence mechanism, the psychogalvanometer also saves considerable time by providing evidence of unemotional associations, which can be interrupted with confidence.

‘Anxiety, neurosis and hyperthyroidism give exaggerated psychogalvanic
reflexes’, Winn continued. ‘Patients with these conditions can be similarly compared with a control. It can be seen that the new psychogalvanometer is of considerable
practical value to the physician and the neurologist, as well as to the psychologist’

References:-

C.E.W. Bellingham, S.  Langford Smith, & A.H. Martin, Some New Apparatus for the Psycho-galvanic Reflex Phenomenon, Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Volume 6, Issue 2, 1928, pp.137-148.

R. Coupland Winn, ‘The Psychogalvanometer in Practice’, Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Volume 7, Issue 3, September 1929, pages 218-219.

Treating Shell Shock. Ethel Mortimer Langdon, ‘In the Mental Workshop – Reflections on Modern Psychopathy’ – 1922

19 Friday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1920s, historical source material

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From time to time one stumbles across a piece of writing, a lecture, a work or object that unclouds another lens into our vision of times gone-by. Until recently I had never heard of Ethel Mortimer Langdon, nor of Sydney’s Women’s Club which was quite active in the first decades of the twentieth century. For that I have to express gratitude to the souls beavering away at the National Library to build its web-site ‘Trove’. The newspaper collection is getting larger by the minute. The search engine is easy to navigate and the online press-clipping service that results is well ordered. Typing the word ‘psychoanalysis’ into the search engine then trawling through the findings one by one was enough to do it.

I retrieved an account of Ethel Langdon’s lecture from the newspapers and from thence  went to the National Library catalogue to find the published copy. It is a little rambling. She appears to have padded  it out. She repeated herself, often. But what she has to say about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as a new form of treatment for anyone – including herself – is clear and important, as people began contemplating its  development in the post war years. Her lecture and her audience put paid to the notion that in the early 1920s knowledge and interest in psychoanalysis was the province of an  exclusive club of doctors, a few lay personages and the avant-garde. It appears that people were beginning to think about the unconscious, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as an option for their own mental distress.

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In the Mental Workshop is the published version of a lecture given by Ethel Mortimer Langdon to the Women’s Club in  Sydney on 5 April 1921. Langdon’s interests covered migration and resettlement and, together with her husband, she was connected with the formation of the Returned Soldiers League ( RSL). While residing in Ireland she was involved with Dublin’s Public Health System,   Housing, Child Welfare and the development of the British Mental Deficiency Bill and its extension to Ireland by the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland. Langdon had had her own troubles and breakdown, and appears to have received treatment in the United States. There is more to learn about this woman and her activities.

There is little information about the Women’s Club other than that gleaned from the online press. It appears to have been founded in about 1900, drawing together professional and educated women actively interested in social and political reform. Members met for lectures, educational events and socialising. By 1922 its membership was about 200.It is not surprising that members of the Women’s Club were interested in psychoanalysis. Knowledge of Freud’s work had reached Australia by 1911 when a group of interested folk  in Sydney began to read his work. Freud himself had sent a letter of encouragement, urging that his work spread to all parts of the world.

After the war ended in 1918 people began talking about their feeling that the world they had known before the war was lost, that Armageddon had been upon them, that the task now was to develop a new order.  What was to happen next was anyone’s guess as the European world watched their political leaders mete out a brutal punishment to Germany at Versailles and the League of Nations formed. In Melbourne, Mr Fitchett, the editor of the religious paper, The Southern Cross, predicted the Soviet Regime in Russia would be the new enemy. The Great War’s killing machines had devastated and shattered the bodies and souls of the men who returned home. During the years of fighting, and afte,r German, British and Allied soldiers alike presented doctors with a new syndrome – hysterical conversion reaction, breakdown, shell-shock, war neurosis –  paralysis of  mind. Doctors on both sides began to throw out Freud’s theory that psychosexuality was central to development. Trauma could be treated by analysis, dream interpretation hypnosis – and catharsis.

Ethel Langdon took up these matters in her lecture.  Firmly disassociating herself from spirituality, spiritism and the supernatural, she set out to elucidate   ‘the cause, cure and effect on present day life on diseases of the mind’. There was no magic; no smoke and mirrors in this. Psychoanalysis, she explained, had developed from Freud’s extension of ideas suggested to him during his time in France under the tutelage of Charcot. Langdon cited  psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, defining psychoanalysis as a ‘method which makes possible the analytic reduction of the psycho-contents to its simplest expression, and the discovery of the line of least resistance in the development of a harmonious personality’. In shell-shock,  she explained, the patient has not lost his senses, but has become jarred and out of harmony’. It symptoms were as varied as the people experiencing them including

‘loss of memory, insomnia, terrifying dreams, emotional instability, diminution of self-confidence and self-control, attacks of unconsciousness, or of changed consciousness sometimes accompanied by convulsive movement resembling epileptic fits, incapacity to understand even the smallest matters, obsessive thoughts, usually of the most gloomy and painful kind, in some cases, incipient delusions’.

The war had moved from the field into the interior of the mind. One might endure calmly face enormous dangers on the battlefield only to succumb to unconsciousness when one reached safety. Indeed it may well be that soldier and tank commander, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, was able to face enemy fire during the Great War, as he has related in his autobiography, The Long Weekend. In later years as he worked his way through memories of these times, he was ‘in hell’. Shock and disturbance was far more serious than it first appeared.

The main worry was wrong and insensitive treatment, Langdon stated There was need for careful assessment of the patient’s disposition, character and earlier personal experiences was essential – for the degree of shock and trauma was contingent on the mind experiencing it.

Langdon also argued that the discoveries and benefits from psychoanalytic treatment of people traumatized by war should be extended to the civilian population and impressed  upon her listeners the necessity to recognise  trauma and emotional distress as being states of disharmony with oneself – and treatable with psychotherapy.Amongst us there are many people who have some idiosyncrasy or who are not quite normal; to label these insane would be absurd, and so it would be an equal sin to call those who, owing to the war and their nerve drained condition, have been forced to abandon their work and who have to be re educated back to civilian life.She advocated treatment for children  ‘showing abnormal tendencies or retarded mental activity ‘when symptoms seem to have no hereditary connection with the parents….A child’s difficulty is generally caused chiefly by his inability to adjust himself to his environment and to adjust his environment to him’.

Langdon praised plans to establish a Chair of Psychiatry at Sydney University. It was essential. It would ensure scientifically proved standards of treatment were established and maintained rather than allowing charlatans and pretenders into the arena. The study of psychiatry, she stated, would ‘bring more knowledge of the wonders of prevention by means of diagnosis and re-education and cure of mind ailments by active scientific means, not just by detention and isolation, not only to the scientific but also to the lay mind.

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In 1923 Langdon’s published lecture reached the editor’s desk for the second edition of the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. A one sentence review dismissed it. Langdon said nothing new about the subject. For a Historian it is revealing comment. One might wonder whether the editor, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University, Sir Francis Anderson was being a little dismissive of a woman’s contribution. His marriage to feminist and activist Maybanke Anderson suggests otherwise. Langdon’s lecture held nothing new for his colleagues and him. As a marker of current thinking around war, shell shock,   psychotherapy and the potential contribution of psychoanalysis in the domestic sphere Langdon’s lecture is valuable source material.