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Category Archives: 1930s

Clara Lazar Geroe’s contribtion: Fetschrift for Ferenczi: “Soul analysis studies. Theses on the main questions of psychoanalysis by Members of the Hungarian psychoanalytical association” Edited by Sigmund Freud, 1933

01 Saturday Apr 2023

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Archive work, Emigres, History of Child Guidance, Hungarian influence upon psychoanalysis in Australia, Hungary

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child analysis, Clara Geroe, historical references, Influence of Hungarian school, lost archival material resurtacing on the internet, psychoanalytic pedagogy

In 1933, well before the Hungarian Society suffered the ravages of war and dispersion all over the world, Sigmund Freud invited members of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society to contribute to a Fetschrift for Sandor Ferenczi. The great man was ill and would die before the year was done and the volume published.

Freud had gathered the cream of the Society to contribute: Alice and Michael Balint, Istvan Hollos the Society’s Secretary, Imre Hermann, the President, Vilma Kovacs, Geza Roheim, Lillian Rotter, Laszlo Revesz, Mihaly Eisler, Kata Levy and her husband, Lajos, Lily Hadyu, Endre Almasy, Fanny Hann, Sigmund Pfeifer and finally, Klara Lazar.

Eleven years later in 1944 Hungary became Hitler’s target. it was a cruel fate: Jews were rounded up, shot into the Danube, or deprted to certain death at Auschwitch. By then some of the analysts, aided by the Ernest Jones resettlement fund, had departed for other parts of the world.

Klara Lazar was one of these. She migrated to Australia in 1940. Others remained, defending psychoanalysis as best they could.

For Klara Lazar the rupturing experience of forced migration, meant that part of her was left behind, even though she returned to Hungary once more in her life, for a brief visit in 1961. Migration, unlike tourism, means there is no return home. Word of her contribution to this volume is not known in Australia. Yet, upon reading it, one is delighted by her liveliness and ability to relate to the young people in her care. Does she anticipate some of Winnicott’s later work with parents at the Maudsley Hospital in London?

Luckily, or is it sadly, the Fetschrift for Ferenczi has finally made its way to the online platform, http://www.archive.org. The full edition can be found here. For those who cannot read Hungarian Google translate will assist access to a group of fine thinkers.

I have used Google to translate Klara Lazar’s piece, Nevelési tanácsadás – Educational Counselling.

It’s not perfect but you will get the drift..

Here is the translation –

“Ever since Freud showed how important childhood situations, the parental home, and the behavior of parents and educators are in the development of adult neuroses, the desire for prophylaxis has stood side by side with our curative efforts. This directed the attention of analysts to childhood. In our imagination, it is evident we should try to prevent the onset of neuroses in childhood. In practice this has significant difficulties. The causes of neuroses are the harmful experiences that the child has through parents, educators, and the adult environment, which, due to his vulnerability as a child, his biological and spiritual structure, he can neither avoid nor process. These indicate two paths for prophylaxis:

1. to teach adults to behave in ways that it exposes the child to the least amount of shock and illness;

2. to help the child recover with as little damage as possible.

We know that the behavior of the parents with the child it is very difficult to influence, because the principles of education and the behavior towards the child (and these two very often do not overlap!) are only apparently arbitrary. In fact they are determined due to deep reasons. On the other hand, it is very difficult to influence the child directly, due to his deep connections with his environment. Despite these difficulties, psychoanalysis started on both paths of prophylaxis. The first path led to analytical pedagogy, the second to child analysis.

In order to develop the basic principles of analytical pedagogy and actual child analysis, we first had to learn the language of the child’s soul. For about 10 years, only data collection took place. From the observation of healthy children, children’s dreams, the manifestations of childhood sexuality, from the registration of “bad habits” and “unconscious” childhood manifestations, we see confirmation of everything that was known from the analysis of adults. In the beginning, in our therapeutic vision — if it was a child — the adult, nurturing person was also included in addition to the child. Apart from the real difficulties, the reason for this was that, being adults ourselves, it is an easier task for us to understand and influence adults. As the development of psychoanalysis expanded our knowledge of the child’s psyche, and its structure and characteristics became more and more clear, analysts learned to return to childhood impartially through the recollections and self-analysis of their adult patients.

In literature, Freud (Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjáhrigen Knaben) and Ferenczi (“A cock-loving boy” [AKA Little Hans] were the first to report cases of child neurosis. An acquaintance of Ferenczi’s refers to the the little “cock-loving” Árpád. Freud only controls the course of treatment for his little patient from the background, the treatment is carried out by the father himself. These indirect child analyzes are the first indications that the analytical technique can be transferred to the treatment of children. Freud even believes that no one but the father could have succeeded: “…the technical difficulties of a psychoanalysis would have remained insurmountable at such a tender age…”

Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was the first to open the door to the children’s room and cutting off the mediators. She began to regularly analyze children with the aim of healing. She opened the door of the children’s room, visited the child in their home, because she believed the child’s environment needed to be realistically included in the analysis for the child’s honest expression and understanding.

Melanie Klein developed a special analytical technique for younger children (2-5 years old): the play technique. She brought a symbolic miniature outside world from toys into the analytical room; observing the child’s spontaneous play and using the symbolism of play to interpret the child’s unconscious. Her work brought new knowledge about the earliest forms of the Oedipus conflict and the early stages of development of the little girl’s sexuality. For these child analysts, numerous theoretical works (Freud’s, Abraham’s treatises on the development of sexuality and libido, and Ferenczi’s treatises on the development of the sense of reality) provided the basis for them to immerse themselves in the spiritual life of the child.

Oscar Pfister from Switzerland was the first to bring the analysis to teachers. As a priest, he had ample opportunity to use his analytical knowledge to look into children’s spiritual problems “in statu nascendi” and help them. Bernfeld’s theoretical works aim to lay the foundation for analytical pedagogy. He was the first to deal with the phenomena of adolescent life, group and community formation. .

In “Verwahrloste Jugend”, August Aichhorn reports on what he observed in the group education of disturbed children with the knowledge of “Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse” and the “superior ego” (Freud) and from these observations developed a completely new, analytical educational method. He formed homogenous groups of his students according to their symptoms and, adapting to their unconscious, without any external pressure, offered them a way through the love-relationship, so that the development of their ego can continue and thereby become social. Zulliger’s special practical work is characterized by the fact that he is a teacher and an analyst in one person. With a subtle sense, he recognizes the unconscious roots of his students’ learning and character development and uses the teacher’s positional advantage in the emotional transmission relationship this preventing more serious problems.

Anna Freud’s work represents a new chapter in the development of child analysis. In her work entitled “Einführung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse”,s he reports on the analyzes of neurotic children in their latency period. Her technical innovation: giving up analytical passivity in the introductory phase of child analysis, she tries to win the child’s love and trust with active means, because the child only maintains a positive emotional relationship possible. Theoretically: the child’s ego has only partially separated itself from its parents, it is still partially developing and works under the influence of realistic demands from them. From this follows what defines the difference between child and adult analysis: The child does not develop a real disposition; child analysis is not possible until we can work with the ready-made parts of the ego, which is joined by the further shaping of the ego through the environment, i.e. the educational work.

If we now look at the development of child analysis, we see that at first the analysis of children could only be imagined through adults, or later the milieu of the child included in the analysis realistically (Hug-Hellmuth) or symbolically (Melanie Klein). Then when we already knew enough about the child to directly we have found that the specific structure of the child’s soul dictates for the adult environment, not as a mediator of analysis, but as a supplement in its natural nurturing position. Now, based on our knowledge of the child’s mental structure, we are able to consciously choose the way of our help — direct treatment of the child, management of education, or a combination of these two.

For Pfister, Aichhorn and Zulliger, the position of priest, educator and teacher also dictated contact with parents, supporting their healing work with educational advice, and actively influencing the child’s external world. Understanding the unconscious made it easier to recognize educational mistakes, and their social situation made it easier to see these mistakes. The positive results of their practical experience encouraged the analysts to set up analytic education consultants. Aichhorn, as a reviewer of the Jugendamt of the city of Vienna, organizes educational consultants, where he himself and then his students work in his wake. Today, partly under his leadership, work as an educational consultant is carried out within the children’s department of the Vienna psychoanalytic polyclinic. The “educational consultant” technique – although of course it offers the widest possibilities for individual work offers the widest possibilities for individual work. Each educational consultant tailors his technique on a case by case basus. This was developed by Aichhorn, the father of psychoanalytical educational consulting.

In Budapest in 1928, within the framework of the Children’s Protection League, dr. Under the leadership of Margit Dubovitz, the first analytical children’s ambulance was established, which, unfortunately, soon became stateless after the termination of the League’s operation. Now ( in 1933) with the establishment of the Clinic of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Association in Budapest, as part of our new children’s clinics, we are also trying to work as educational consultants.

The introduction of shorter-term treatments in suitable cases was justified by the external circumstances of our ambulance: for the many children who are waiting for help, our analytical workforce is too few, and it is important from a social point of view that this should reach the children who really need analysis. Below, I present some cases from my work as an educational consultant here.

The possibilities of “educational counseling” are of course limited by the accessibility of the parents’ unconscious and primarily by the severity of the child’s illness. My own experience shows that it can be applied very widely; even for children who come to us with various complaints and often show symptoms that seem to be severely neurotic but a minority are truly neurotic. In most cases, the difficulties that children present are not deeply rooted neuroses of traumatic origin, not even rigid forms of reaction, but simple reactions to the behavior of the educators or parents. However, if this correction does not take place: “gutta cavat lapidem”, character anomalies or neuroses inevitably develop from the above beginnings sooner or later.1

I am reporting the following cases to illustrate how long-lasting, good results can be achieved, sometimes even more I am reporting the following cases to illustrate how long-lasting, good results can be achieved, sometimes even in seriously impressive cases, educational counseling. I have been monitoring several of these counseling cases for a long time, and sometimes I receive or request reports about them. In general, with the exception of one case, I report on children I have known for the third year, since I myself strongly doubted the durability of the quickly achieved results, and so I only dare to refer to such cases, which I have had in mind for a long time.

k I.

Bandi, 10 years old. His mother brings him. He is the child of janitor parents living a good married life in orderly conditions, apart from a 12-year-old, II. they have a civilian daughter. Complaint: he is a bad student, even though he is intelligent, he is about to fail and their problem is whether he should go to civics? Disobedient, lazy, unambitious, inattentive, playing around, messing around, unpleasant at home. The mother is a good-looking, smart, apparently energetic, strict woman with a sword. She resents the child mainly for his laziness, punishes him a lot, deprives him of his pleasures, and even beats him. ,

Please, being a boy, I can’t use him for anything and he’s lazy at school too; if I send it for something, or if it should help, it wanders off, useless. I am so unlucky with it! The other, my little girl, is the first student for being a girl, she helps at home, she’s clever, she’s smart” and proudly adds: “She even plays the violin beautifully!”

“Does Bandi study music?” I ask.

“But, please, he’s neglecting his studies too. Damn, we can’t waste the money on violin lessons, it wouldn’t last for two.” ,

“What about the master?”

,” Please, he is a good man, but he doesn’t care much about the children. He is down in the boiler room all day; the care of the house, the lot of cleaning and running around is all mine.”

In response to one or two more questions, she says that since his early childhood her son worked hard with strict parents, competing with men.

The situation was obvious from the constant complaint that the child was so lazy for being a boy, from the description of their life, from the praise about the girl . The mother, in her cherishing love for her daughter, compensates herself for her penis envy in her daughter. In her son, she suppresses the men she envies, and she lives out her complaints and aggression against her husband. The child’s behavior is the answer to this treatment.

Talking to the reasonable, correct, open child, my hypothesis was strengthened. The reason for his lack of ambition is that he cannot compete with his “perfect” older sister, and the competition is unequal, because he does not receive the reward of his mother’s love. He is so full of complaints against his mother and jealousy of his older sister that he just pours out when he is given a little encouragement: Mama is very strict with him , makes an exception with her sister, she – usually the girls – have a much better job, they get clothes, they are not beaten, , but they are such chatty monkeys!” He doesn’t take his word for it, because mom is never satisfied with him anyway.

And the tramping?” He likes to wander around with his good friends, ride their bikes, which his mother often forbids as a punishment. “What about studying?” Yes, he is a bad student, but he really wants to go to the civil service, because if he could only be a coal miner, everyone would look down on him. And on top of all this, as the symbol of unattainable desires and dreams, the grandeur: the violin! If he could play the violin too! But it can’t be, because it doesn’t take 10 pengős and two, he doesn’t even deserve it. ,

Maybe we could talk to mom after all? say, if you will study better?”

An indescribably bright and yet doubtful look is the answer to this.

Now it’s mom’s turn again; I tell her that the child made a good impression on me, I don’t consider her sick. I think the only problem is that he loves his mother very much and is jealous that she gives the little girl more honors and considers her more talented. , The child feels that she loves the little girl more!”

The mother acknowledges the jealousy and justifies it immediately with a small episode: , The little girl asks for a cube of sugar because her coffee is bitter, she gets it, and the boy immediately asks for it too. I say: Your cup is smaller, one is enough, – so he is not done with the reproach: He doesn’t give it to me because he loves Irma more, he doesn’t love me! He’s so sensitive! I’m going to get angry and pick him up.”

Now I’m just passing by how much Bandi wants to learn music and that there is no money for that while Ilonka is studying. A lot of small episodes come to light, through which I manage to show the mother even more that she demands more from her son, . because he’s a boy. She treats him badly because boys have a better fate and she feels sorry for the little girl because she is a girl. He also feels sorry for himself, he values his own work so much.

Laughing at this, she says that he would rather be a man if he has to work. —

When I emphasize his son’s great love for her, she is visibly moved and happy about it.

Thus, I manage to negotiate a free vagabond and bicycling lesson for Bandi every day, and she promises that she will try to treat the two children equally and register the boy as a citizen in the fall. Together with the mother, we communicate these to the child.

After two weeks, they come again, both of them visibly more satisfied. The mother is happy to report: the child is learning, he listens, and the situation with his sister has also eased. The mother spontaneously mentions that it has been decided that the boy will take his exams in the fall. they will also teach him music. After the successful exam, I see the child again in the fall as a citizen, he is also learning music, which he is very happy about. Of course, there are setbacks in learning, weak average, but they also see improvement at home and at school. The mother visited me a few more times, she was still satisfied, which is best proven by the fact that she referred many complaining parents to our order.

_________________________________________________

xx II. In another case, the special kindness was given by the fact that the mother became aware of the reasons for her educational mistake almost on her own, and thus came to us with the ready-made material for being a simple working woman. After one of my popular lectures, where I talked about educational mistakes and their unconscious sources, she approached me and told me that she was so self-conscious about certain points in the lecture that she hoped she could get advice on what to do with his younger daughter, Erzsi, who is 4 years old. whom he can’t stand. She is willful, tyrannical, if she doesn’t want something, or cries until she vomits, or declares: “I yell so much that the neighbors run!” When she does this they let her go for the sake of peace. She also has a 6-year-old daughter, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

She has never dared to talk about with anyone, she was ashamed, and considered it impossible, unnatural: that she didn’t love this little girl when she was born, and not even for a long time after! After the birth of her first child, she had a peak period and the doctors advised her not to have any more, but when she became pregnant and applied for surgery, her doctors encouraged her to carry [the pregnancy] through and even though she didn’t want to, she couldn’t help herself. She and her husband had serious financial problems. Throughout her pregnancy, she was nervous, constantly vomiting.

In the meantime, however, she reconciled somewhat, with the hope that she would at least have a son. When she found out that her daughter was born: she hardly looked at her, she felt a deep sadness, she didn’t want to touch her, she couldn’t breastfeed her, and she remembers well that when her husband first came in and took the child in his arms, she told him angrily: “Leave that baby alone!” This was repeated later; whenever the father touched her, she always waved him off. “I don’t like her and I didn’t want to see my master like him either.” SHe says with great shame that he didn’t love the child so much that he didn’t even take care of her, neighbors took care of him and only when she was a couple of months old, when she once bathed and dressed her, she was moved by the child’s helplessness and neediness and started to care for him, she felt sorry for him and when developed, and loved it. Today she loves her very much,she spoiled her. The child was prone to crying, vomiting and hernias, so she went to the doctor a lot with her. She was always worried about his life.

It turns out that since this emotional change,s he feeds her excessively, fills her with force, torments her with loving care, and the child reciprocates this violence by vomiting, yelling, and uproar at the neighbors, with which she terrifies and embarrasses her mother. The little girl is what we imagine her to be after the antecedents: thin, well-groomed, intelligent, bully with her brother and peers, narcissistic and she feels good about it; she makes his anger felt immediately and considers this to be normal.

It was very easy to make the mother understand (she herself said that she did not dare to let the child cry or punish her, she was always afraid that she would get sick or die) that this is a great indulgence: compensation for the old hatred; fear for the child’s life: remorse for her death-wishes. She realized that if she wanted the child’s eating to improve, the vomiting and tantrums to stop, she should not force the little girl to eat and temporarily take care of her meals – even if she did not eat for 2 days – and her other bad manners. Too much care can be just as bad, even worse, than too much strictness.

She kept our agreement, which was a great act of heroism at home — with his father, with the environment — in addition to the child’s provocation. After the first difficult week, the little girl became aware of the changed hand, her appetite returned, after 2-3 rampages for which she did not receive extras, she stopped rampaging. After two weeks I gave mother permission, if necessary, to punish her. ‘If the child really annoys you: tell her, show her.

The quick effect of our advice would have been like a fairy tale magic wand, if the little girl’s measles hadn’t jeopardized the result. This illness almost brought the mother’s old mechanisms into action, and she came to me again with her concerns. At that point, I emphatically asked her not to change her agreed treatment; we will have won a case if the child spontaneously accepts to eat after the patient’s lack of appetite (a common experience) and does not allow his tyranny to gain strength again during his illness, even though he cares for him a lot. The mother also passed this test beautifully, her older daughter also got measles, after a mild illness they both started to eat, and they became good friends with each other in their shared misfortune. She adds to one of the mother’s positive reports: she actually received the same advice from pediatricians, but she couldn’t take it, now it worked out so well! Since then, I have often heard about them directly and indirectly, there is nothing wrong with the child.

j s III. Sanyi, 12 years old,

citizen, only child. About 10 days before our examination, he ran away from home with a friend, they wandered for 2 days, the police brought them back. There are no complaints about his behavior, but he failed a grade repetition in the 1st high school and now, in the 3rd high school. he fails 3 subjects in civics, even though he has a good mind. His reason for running away, according to his parents: shame due to poor studies and failure. The mother is extremely worried, someone who attaches her child to her in every way, and if a child runs away from home, we can assume more serious symptoms, derangement, which needs analysis, and after what we heard, we thought of this here as well; but the situation was different. This escape was not serious, they set off without money or equipment, as it turned out later: not so much out of fear of punishment and shame, but rather out of some deep inner desire: free-

This escape was not serious, he left without money or equipment, as it turned out later: not so much out of fear of punishment and shame, but rather out of some deep inner desire: to be free! Free to roam, at least for a while without anyone to command! The boy sleeps in the same bed with his mother (he is 12 years old!), according to his mother, because he is very restless at night, tosses and covers himself. The child complains that his mother does not allow him to be around other children, nor to go on trips or to play football; on Sunday, you have to walk with your parents in good order. The mother justifies these prohibitions that her son is well-bred, a good child, the rest would spoil it; he is afraid of overheating and pneumonia when moving freely, all the more because he had tonsillitis a lot, his heart and lungs were attacked, and another child in their family had already died because his mother let him go freely. The principle is that it is best for children to stay with their parents. Sanyi could now get to Lake Balaton with one action, but he doesn’t dare to let go because he wants to go swimming. the child’s heart would certainly not be able to take boating. Not this mother at our first meeting. I managed to convince him neither that the child needed more time off, nor that it would not be good for a 13-year-old boy to sleep in the same bed with him. His castration fears, fixation and guilt towards his son were not approachable from any side. However, we agreed that the child would be examined and if his heart and lungs were found to be intact, he would be released to Lake Balaton. Of course, the tests were negative and Sanyi left happily. I talked to him once or twice before, it turned out that he was masturbating, with the usual fears (spinal atrophy, impotence, as a consequence of masturbation), which I tried to dispel. It also turned out that the mother is unfoundedly afraid of him being spoiled. He is extremely burdened and stressed by the great training and worrying of the mother, ashamed of this “mama’s boy” role . His thinking is clouded by the many ambivalent emotions weighing on him towards the tyrannical and fixating mother, and he keeps wandering into daydreams (Tagtraums). In his fantasies, he talks about his gratitude to his mother, but he declares he would be happy if he were allowed to sleep in a separate room.

In autumn, after the holidays, he came again. He had grown well fattened, grew, big In autumn, after the holidays, they bring it again; she gained weight, grew, felt great and completely changed. His demeanor opened up, became almost masculine. The parents noted all this with great joy, and even though this summer and the medical tests were a good trump card against his mother, they were not willing to agree to sleeping separately even at their son’s request. There was nothing left but to try to get help from the father’s side. The father proved to be understanding and well-intentioned, and through him the child’s freedom was achieved – despite the mother’s objections.

This was at the beginning of the school year. I saw him again around Christmas; there was no problem with studying or anything else, the mother has a hard time accepting the new constellation, but the child and his father have become strong allies and vote her out. Through the teacher – who sent him to me – I hear about them more often, so far the result is lasting. —

So it also happens that a person frees the priest with educational advice! The boy’s vagrancy, which looked like derangement, was a healthy attempt to escape from his mother, documenting what his mother did not want to understand anyway, that the boy wanted to break away from her, and this was required by his healthy development.

On the one hand – by sleeping in the same bed, his mother gave the boy too much freedom and too much excitement, on the other hand, in a tyrannical way, she prevented him from venting his excitement and feelings in any way (prohibitions on masturbation, sports, making friends). His emotions will be disharmonious, ambivalent, no: he just loves, but also fears and hates his mother, the source and suppressor of his excitement. The only outlet for his ever-increasing tensions is fantasizing, which distracts him from his studies, and since his fantasies are also in “forbidden” areas, he has to suppress these and the feelings that come with them. This again increases his internal tension and reduces his ability to work. This unbearable tension drove him to wander. When the he gets help in difficult situations, his ability to perform is released, his learning improves, and the child blossoms.

Case 4.

Józsi, 11 years old, 5th grader, father is a baker’s assistant, mother is a laundress, only child. His physical development was normal, his habituation to cleanliness was easy, the III. he studied quite well until elementary school, after that he started to decline, lost his way, missed school for 2 weeks at one time.

On New Year’s Eve, his parents left him alone in the evening, then he ran away, spent the night outside the house, when his parents found out about this, he says: ,,k . . . . “aunts” (sic!) wanted to see and listen to what they were talking about. At the same time, he secretly sells small items that he receives as gifts, and sometimes takes small amounts at home. Upon reporting the school, he is sent to foster care, and from there to a boys’ home, where he has otitis media received, operated on and sent home. Since then, the child’s character has been deteriorating, he lies, is dirty, urinates at home and at school, defecates, often twists and studies very poorly. he is constantly punished both at school and at home, his parents – who used to pamper him and call him names – are now rude to him, especially his father. They beat a lot; according to her own admission, her mother he often bursts out in his anger: “I wouldn’t mind if you died!” “I’ll kill you if you lie!” etc. The mother cries a lot for her son, who, seeing this, cries with her. According to his mother, the change in the boy’s character could have been caused by the fact that they changed apartments and the child got into bad company at school and there is a public house on the street near their new apartment, which excites the child. 2

The boy is small, with a neglected appearance, a very dull facial expression, withdrawn, trusting, indifferent. He appears to be sub-intelligent, answers with difficulty, softly, without color. The question, do you feel good, really surprises you? It’s even more so when I say that I don’t think he’s having a very good time, because I hear from his parents how bad things are, how much he gets out, both at home and at school. And how would it be good to help it to look different? At this, the child loses his previous indifference and begins to cry bitterly. I let him cry, and then I say that he came here to get help, there is no punishment here, this is not a school, patronage or court, the children come here so that if there is no way they can manage something on their own or with their parents, help get He will definitely have such things and we will try to help him! The child sniffs more calmly now, we talk a little more in his own slang, about football, movies, friends, he leaves very relaxed. If we thought of depravity in our previous case: Józsi’s symptoms — vagrancy, theft, lying, truancy, dullness and dirtiness If in our previous case we thought of depravity: Józsi’s symptoms — vagrancy, theft, lying, truancy, dullness and dirtiness — pointed to an even more serious disease,? which naturally I did not think could be solved with simple counseling. In spite of this, as in all cases when I start dealing with a child, I asked the parents – in front of the child – that for a while, while the child is entrusted to me, they should preferably not be punished or beaten, but wait to see what I can do with the child in another way. I have a two-fold goal with this: on the one hand, to win the child’s goodwill, and on the other hand, since the meeting takes place in front of him, he feels the treatment that is different from the previous ones and this – without taking his promise – obliges him a little, that something else is going on with him too. – let them do it. I order this little boy for treatment three times a week. When the child came 2-3 times, the change in appearance, facial expression, and behavior was shocking. While the first time he gave the impression of a disheveled, disheveled, dull, defiant, aloof, uninterested child, 3the second time his clothes were in order, overall he was freer, lighter, his facial features softened, as if a great weight had been lifted from someone. In short, he seemed like a well-cared-for child who has good things to do at home and is good with his surroundings.

Although I have experienced it several times, I am always very surprised when children show such a big change in appearance, manner, behavior and mood after one or two conversations. I suspected myself of being biased, but others who see the children state the same thing, and I myself have seen a similar rapid, big change in the children of other analysts at our clinic. Even more strangely, this change often remains permanent. In this case, I think, it was possible to see why it was created so quickly and the result remained permanent. The boy is happy to report that the parents kept their promise, did not hurt him, and can go to the square. Studying is done in two hours, you can play for the other two. Now, more precisely, he goes home, but never before! It’s not good to be at home, you shouldn’t pee; dad always sleeps during the day (he works at night) and immediately yells and hits, mom also always fights when she comes in the evening and he’s not home. And if he gets on the field, he is a “soccer”, “glutü”,And he – when he gets down to the square – , soccer”, , glutyü”, window shopping, and hütty!

He travels so far that by the time he gets home, it is late at night, and at home there are already fights and beatings; so now there is no! There are also many complaints about the school; the teacher, the real monster, is unjust, evil, rude, mocks and beats the children, especially the poor ones! , You too?” , Uhm, – only, – he always makes fun of me, hits me on the head, that’s why I don’t like him at school.” “What are you mocking?” , Well, he always says my name, the others laugh at him.” I didn’t manage to find out why it was a tease for him when his name was said, but it soon became clear. All I could find out about the bowel movement is that it has been there since he was in the home. There, according to his story, they had a joyless life, they were kept strictly and with a lot of beatings, their supervisor only allowed them to go to the toilet three times a day at a fixed time, and they introduced the fashion of defecating and he got used to it. He feels the urge to defecate, but he postpones it until it’s too late, just like small 1-2-year-old children.

Because of this, he has no shame, he declares that he is not stinky, they don’t know at school, and when his mother sees him, she gets angry and gets him out – there is a defiant silence. After 2 weeks – just by the way – he says: “Since I’ve been coming here, I’ve only done it twice in my pants, and I haven’t even been beaten for it.” In these two cases, we managed to expose his defiant reactions to bad luck at school: both times he did it in helpless anger. He visited me about a month ago, when one day he was drawing something, and instead of H. József, he wrote himself T. József under his drawing. , So what is this? Is that your name? Until now you said: H. József! Or am I wrong?” The child is confused, blushes, stammers: “No, my name is T. József!” Excited, he doesn’t want to give any information. “Do you have a second father?” “No, that’s my dad!” “His name?” , H. Mihály. T.’s mother’s name!” he finally groans in great agony. , What name do they call you at school?

To József T.” , That’s why you said they’re making fun of me?” ,

Yes. T. is such an ugly name!”

“Well, maybe that’s not the only reason you don’t like this name?”

He listens. He keeps repeating this bluntly, very brokenly: “My dad ….”

“Tell me, son, do you know why they call me Mama’s name?” ,

No!” ,

When will another child be called by the mother’s name?” ,

Uncle Teacher said. . . he told me too. . . if illegal. . .” , That’s why you said they were making fun of me?” — He nods. , When did you first hear about this? Have you known for a long time?”

“At first I knew my name was different, but I didn’t know why, I didn’t even think about it.” “Didn’t you ask?” , Yes, but mom didn’t say why?!

Once, dad was having fun in the old apartment, the housekeeper shouted that there is no coal in the cellar: The thief…, the scoundrel…, lives in a wild marriage!” I think of the “aunties” who “be- to wind” you want: , So maybe they said something about mom too? Something bad?” :

NEHI and NEHA

“Are you sure, Józsi?” ,

But, yes… I knew: something ugly, bad. Here, in our street, when we came to live here, I already knew.” “Were you with them?” , No.” s Hdívák? ” , No. I was always curious about what they were saying, I just wanted to listen, but nothing special.”

I didn’t manage to find out directly about his fantasies about prostitutes, but I could deduce from our other material that: he wanted to know the “k” — who he was spying on — his mother; his mother’s secrets — the “wild marriage”. His mother had many abortions; the “k”s have intercourse, but there is no child, they do something secretly, sinfully. At that time, it often dies

He often heard the socialists being scolded, not mentioned with any honorable adjectives, and he knew that his parents were them; from these half-suspected, half-heard things, he wanted to piece together the secrets of his parents, — his own ashamed, hidden origin, behind which he looks for sins to be ashamed of in his parents, if only as a revenge for the injuries they receive because of it. When we shed light on these, we discuss sending his parents in to see if we can help with the name issue. The parents, in great shame and apologizing, say that the child belongs to the current father, but he was born prematurely and that they conspired and grilled him a few years ago, and due to lack of time and money, they have not legalized the child until now. The father has now promised that this will be replaced as soon as possible. We share the good news with the child. After this, there is a rapid improvement, which is also noticed at school; a nice religion teacher honors him, he gets a poem for the exam, which makes him very happy, because he was looked down upon by everyone and was last in the class for 2 years.

He does well in his exams, his parents and his whole family celebrate him as a converted sheep, and he receives a gift. The summer went well, in a holiday promotion, he was considered a child with little interest and easy to handle. He almost completely stops having bowel movements, according to his mother, only one problem happens once, in September, when he has enteritis. In autumn, there are 1-2 minor school disasters, sometimes even a few pennies are missing at home. Complaints against his teacher later revealed: why did he change so suddenly in the third grade? . “The teacher was rude to mom too,” he once said.

“How?” , He said to a boy: pimp.

I told mom then, he went to school and the teacher told him. to uncle for saying nasty words to us. Then they quarreled together, mother also scolded him at home.”

It turns out that this discussion took place with mutual insults, with some political edge, and that the teacher did not look kindly on the child after that, or at least that is how the boy puts it. His mother always told him the truth during this time. The child thoroughly enjoyed the new situation, he hurried to rebel – instead of his father, against whom he was already seething – against the teacher, on whom he could transfer his jealousy, anger, and contempt for his father The child thoroughly enjoyed the new situation, he hurried to rebel – instead of his father, against whom he was already seething – against the teacher, on whom he could transfer his jealousy, anger, and contempt against his father for “coal thief”, “wild marriage”, etc. because of In addition, all this with the support of his mother! For him, the situation at school has now become as confusing as the one at home: respect and hatred, contempt side by side for the father-person. Meanwhile, the school sent warnings, bad certificates, complaints, until finally the mother also turned against the child, and they started punishing her at home. This then completely upset the child’s balance. He felt that he was being cheated again by his mother, by the adults: 1. with the father, who is not even his father, does not give his name, and is a thief, a marauder, 2. with the teacher, with whom his mother starts the fight, he sides with his mother against the teacher and his mother lets him down, sides with the enemy, believes that he is punishing him for his rant at school, when this is his demonstration next to his mother, the teacher against!

The vagrancy, thefts, sniffing after street girls begin. Then, in patronage, he gets even further away from his parents, which he feels is an even greater betrayal, and anal regression comes. In the second grade — when he is on good terms with his parents — he stifles the accusations against the parents; now, after his disappointments, he rebels, wanting to find out the suspicious secrets, and then shows his parents in his own messed up existence: “you are Pharisees, that’s what you really are, you deserve it!”

This child was under treatment for a maximum of 130 hours, but I was able to monitor him for 2 years — with breaks. The symptoms of urination have completely disappeared; minor frauds, vagrancy, lying, there was even an uncertified class in the first year, but he studied hard. In the meantime, he was assigned to another teacher; he learns German, is transferred to the civilian class, and in very serious family constellations — father’s illness, the birth of a little brother — holds his ground. According to his parents, where they knew him, the constant topic of conversation was this child’s great metamorphosis. Typical: last year he found strings of pearls in a package on the street and – after a great mental struggle – handed it over to the police. He told me this happily and considered it a great feat himself. Then they moved to a distant suburb, from where it was difficult to get to and from treatment; the child said he now so sure of himself that he only needs a little help, say once a month.

CONCLUSION

I still classify this case as one of my educational counseling cases not only because we could not clarify the childhood fixation points of anal regression, but also because it is my conviction that the I owe my success primarily to the coordination of the parents and the role I took on by actively standing by the child. By taking on this role, I gave the child a way so that, trusting in me, they could approach the society of adults (whom they were disappointed in) out of their exclusion; from his depravity and defiance to normality. I used my influence to give him back his good parents. x The common feature of these four cases is that it was possible to help the children’s problems through understanding parents or through parents’ mediation. I could cite many other cases; but I could cite many more cases where, due to parents’ opposition, successful analyzes failed or children could not be treated at all. In such cases, analyzing the parents could help! The scientific significance and therapeutic safety of the “Educational Counseling” outlined here is far behind that of in-depth, regular child analysis. The importance of this technique is primarily that it was quick help, and it is precisely from its advantages that its disabilities flow. If we take into account these disabilities and our refractory cases, we can still establish the absolute necessity and great social importance of the work in “Educational counseling”.”

Women and psychoanalysis in Australia- Agnes Mildred Avery (1881-1944): Chairman of a Company Board – Advocate for Psychoanalysis

14 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Feminism, South Australia, the psychoanalytic process

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advocacy for psychoanalytic training in Austrlaia, auxiliaries and psychoanalysis, Claiming membership of the British Insitute of Psychoanalysis, David Eder, First woman Chairman of the Board in Australia, Medical psychoanalysis, Motherhood and psychoanalysis, Need for further research, the benefits of psychoanalysis, women and psychoanalysis in Australia

The National Library of Australia’s digitized newspaper collection reveals people whose lives were richly lived. They have contributed much and then been forgotten. Agnes Avery (1881-1944) was an early, if not the first woman company director in Australia. She was also, it seems, a member of the British Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1936… but this needs verification. Certainly she was influenced by psychoanalysis. Had she lived longer who knows what difference she would have made.

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In the early 1930s before she went to England and a life changing encounter with psychoanalysis, Mrs Agnes Avery of Adelaide could be described as a rich widow. Mother of five, she claimed expertise in the care and raising of children and was a member of Adelaide’s Psychology Club. She moved in Adelaide’s upper social circles, giving lectures to the Liberal Club, to fundraisers for the Lady Mayoress, lending her presence to philanthropic efforts in that city. These were ‘commonsense and witty lectures’, advocating freedom of thought for children, discouraging indulgence and the spoiling of the little ones, and urging mothers to, basically stop whingeing and get on with it. When, in May 1932 she departed on a lecture tour to London via Africa, with several children in tow, the columnists celebrated her future success and reported upon her activities during her journey through Africa to London. If the social columnists of the day are to be taken seriously, Mrs Avery was a woman of Empire, confident of her views, positive in her approach, and a leader in her field.

After reaching London she visited AS Neill’s ‘free school’ for children. Run on psychoanalytic principles the school was a exemplar of successful pedagogic psychoanalysis. It provided a safe, containing environment for children needing supportive and analytic treatment. ‘Mrs. Avery said that A. S. Neill’s book “The Problem Parent” should be read by every mother and father. “In the hands of the ‘right person child psychology is a power for great good,” said- Mrs. Avery. But, she warned, “in the hands of charlatans it can do tremendous evil.”

A second meeting, with the psychoanalyst, Dr David Eder, was more significant for her. She had consulted Eder, a founder member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Renowned for his work on war shocked soldiers during the Great War, Jewish born, Eder was a socialist, – a former member of the Bloomsbury Socialist Group, and a Zionist, and had been active in the founding of Modern Palestine.

Eder’s earlier interest in motherhood and child development may have drawn Agnes Avery to seek him out. He had practiced medicine in British slums in 1905, and established the first school clinic (the Bow Clinic) in London for poor children in 1907. He continued to provide it with medical services, and then at the Margaret MacMillan School Clinic. In 1910 he established and edited the journal , which brought the health of England’s poor children to the nation’s attention. During the war, Eder spent over a year working part-time as a medical inspector in London’s East End schools. In his pre-war years, Eder was an important contributor to the Fabian Society paper, ‘The New Age’. His work regularly appeared in the paper between 1907 and 1917. He largely addressed medical and psychological topics, including school hygiene and the link between socialism and medicine, as well as politics, literature, and religion. In 1908 The New Age Press published his treatise , in which Eder argued for a social safety net for new mothers just before and after they gave birth. He was also interested in Jung’s version of psychoanalysis, the basis for his involvement in the London Psychoanalytic Group and, in the long term, the British Psychoanalytical Society.

News (Adelaide, SA : 1923 – 1954), Friday 26 February 1932, page 10

Agnes Avery returned to Adelaide in January 1933 after her world tour, only to announce she was selling up and returning to Britain. It appears that her intention was to undergo psychoanalysis. We do not know with whom.

In December 1935 Mrs Avery returned to Australia. By February 1936, much to the mirth of Board, she took over the Chair of the Board of Directors at Stoneyfell Quarries, one of the oldest in the state of South Australia, her father’s former company

By then she was also ‘the only woman member in Australia of the British Institute of Psychoanalysts’, the reporter for the reporter for the Adelaide Advertiser wrote. She had ‘a Freudian theory to account for the modest place that her fellow country women have hitherto taken in industry’, the reporter continued. “The reason is fear,” Mrs Avery said.

“Their ability Is all there, but it is locked up and out of use. Secret fear of making mistakes is accentuated by the prejudice that they sense in the attitude of others. They accept and are paralysed by the verdict of the majority that women would be ‘no good’ In executive positions”, she continued.”If they could rid themselves of fear they would make mistakes, but what of it? Everybody makes mistakes at first. There is no reason why they should not prove themselves as invaluable as women leaders of industry in countries overseas, where such achievements are taken for granted.”

It would be interesting to learn more about this remarkable woman. Where, prior to her departure for London Mrs Avery had used the Adelaide press to promote herself, after her return she faded into the background, presumably devoting herself to her work. She used the Letters columns rather than the lecture circuit to propound her views. On 14 August 1937 a fortnight after the the New Education Fellowship Conference began its six week tour of Australia capital cities, she wrote a letter to the supporting education reform in the face of criticism of the ideas propounded by the Fellowship. She may have been aware that the British psychoanalyst and educationalist Susan Isaacs was a delegate to the Conference.

On 11 May 1938 following a call for the development of a psychological clinic in Adelaide, Mrs Avery wrote again to the editor of the Advertiser.

In South Australia there is urgent need for a clinic whereby the mentally sick may be treated scientifically. No one is perfectly normal and balanced, least of all those who vehemently assert that they are; but the tragedy lies in the fact “that few of us can have any doubt of the general accuracy of the estimate that one person in thirteen in this country < England), and in Australia too is in need of psychological reaajustment. That being so, how can we get to the cause?

Thirty odd years ago. Dr. Freud, of Vienna, discovered the method of “transference,” now known to the world as the psycho-analytical method. In London today is a body of men and women called -The British Institute of Psycho-Analysts.” One thing is essential is that every member must himself or herself have bsen analysed. You must heal yourself before you can heal others. The power is tremendous, and therein lies also the danger. Dealing with sick minds requires skill and technique of no mean order. The power of analysis, allied with medicine, has no limits.

Have we no sons and daughters of pioneers who, in their turn, will go forth and pioneer this great scientific knowledge for the benefit of humanity? It takes three years for a full analysis, followed by two years’ practice under the guidance of your medical-analyst. It can be taken in the stride of a medical course, and the British Institute of Analysts is out to encourage and help medical students to include analysis in their course. Men of undoubted ability and repute, such as Dr. Emest Jones or Dr. Edward Glover, are ready to point the way. To a young nation this is a matter of national import.

She was supported by someone calling themselves, ‘Probono Publico’ perhaps Medical Practitioner in a letter dated 23 May 1938.

War was declared in 1939. By the time anyone was able to examine the issue again it was 1945. Mrs Avery passed away on 27 August 1944.

References

PARADISE FOR CHILDREN (1933, January 14). News (Adelaide, SA : 1923 – 1954), p. 6. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article133066877

MEETING SHAW (1933, February 21). The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1931 – 1954), p. 14. Retrieved February 13, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article41469023

Women In Industry (1936, February 4). The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1931 – 1954), p. 8. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article35406233

Versatile S.A. Family (1936, May 1). News (Adelaide, SA : 1923 – 1954), p. 8. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article132207519

CURING S!CK MINDS (1938, May 11). The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1931 – 1954), p. 28. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article30867716

POINTS FROM LETTERS (1938, May 23). The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1931 – 1954), p. 22. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article30870780

‘Vera Roboz was a follower of Szondi…’

07 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Melbourne, Refugees

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Vera Roboz, nee Groak, is listed as an Australian psychoanalyst in the online dictionary of women psychoanalysts, Psychoanalytikerinnen: Biografisches Lexikon. The web-page Geni shows that Vera to have been born in Budapest in 1912, the third and youngest child and only daughter of Erno Groak, a prominent physician and Irma Groak, nee Pollatstek. Vera’s brother, Bela, born in 1901 and, also a physician, perished in the Ukraine in 1943. Irma Groak and Gyula Groak also died during the war years.Vera and her husband Pal Roboz emigrated to Australia via Vienna in 1957  following the Hungarian uprising against Russians. At that time Pal Roboz was a leading paediatrician in Budapest and Vera, the head of the Department of Criminal Psychology at the Remedial Teacher’s college in Budapest. ( Boros: et al; Psychology and Criminal Justice…)

The Lexicon entry  mentions that Vera Groak was a follower of Leopold Szondi, a psychologist whose theory of fate analysis was predicated on intergenerational transmission of a familial unconscious. Szondi seems to have provided an alternative theory of development to that of Freud and Jung, a third based upon the notion of a familial unconscious.

So who was Szondi?

My account here is drawn from an internet search, and an exploration of Youtube… I am open to correction here and apologize for errors. My acquaintance with Szondi is very new. I have put links to the sources I have used.

Leopold Szondi ( 1898 -1984) was a Hungarian born psychologist and the creator of Fate Analysis and the Szondi Test, a projective test akin to the Rorscharch test. For Szondi human fate is  constituted by the elements as self-, character-, social-, mental-, spiritual- fate. In a short account of Szondi’s life, Dr. Enikő Gy. Kiss from the University of Pecs, notes that”Szondi’s   theory of object choice – „ object choice guided by the ancestors”-, which he later named genotropism, was published in 1937.

Szondi ‘came to the concept of genotropism through the discovery of the choice of illnesses. In pursuance of the research they have gathered data of a thousand child and their fifteen thousand relatives. The examination of family trees had helped him realize the similarities between illnesses amongst the families of spouses. According to his observations the traumas and sicknesses were often the consequences of the familial genotype and not due to other factors. This way the familial heredity is responsible for the sickness of the primarily weak organ. In Szondi’s concept, not only the choice of illnesses but also the choice of occupation, spouses and friends is also due to its familial heredity. These thoughts have lead to the notion of the familial unconsciousness, which is rooted in the latent familial heredity everyone carries along. The familial unconsciousness appears in our choices, and according to Szondi’s concept, our fate is a continuous line of the choices we make”.( Kiss).

Vera Groak appears to have  joined Szondi’s laboratory shortly around the time of the publication of his work “Analysis of Marriages in 1937. An attempt at a theory of choice in love.’ This work even made it into a Sydney based Australian paper called ‘The World’s News’ in 1940. Szondi did not get much publicity in Australia in 1940. News from Europe was hard to get by then. The war was underway.

However the journalist explained it thus:

Dr. Szondy holds that real harmony and understanding between two persons, particularly those who are married to each other and must consequently betogether all or most of the year, year after year, are possible only when the couple belong to the same Instinct Group. That is, they must have suffered through experience or vicariously the same hurts and pains. They must have similar sympathies for those things and
persons to whom sympathy is due. They  must have the same biological urges and psychological suppressions and complexes. And they must have come into the world with the same intuitive instincts, which can only come through genetic inheritance from their forebears. The last is most important of all.

 

Others in Vera’s group were Ferenc Mérei, Klári Sándor, György Garai, Zsuzsa Kőrösi and Imre  Molnar. Her future husband, Pal Roboz, a paediatrician also joinedSzondi’s  laboratory and the work with disabled children. The training program also involved psychoanalytic treatment, exploring with the patient the meaning of his object and life choices. The intention of freeing the patient from the constraints of  familial unconscious patterns down generations to greater freedom of choice…

In 1944 Szondi went from Hungary to Belsen on the Kastner train. The original intention was for the train to go straight to Switzerland but it was diverted to Belsen where the passengers remained for six months. Eventually after negotiations with Eichmann a ransom was paid for him and the other 1300 odd passengers. The train eventually ended its journey in Switzerland. Szondi lived in Zurich for the remainder of this life.Vera Groak Roboz and her husband appear to have remained in Hungary.

In later life Szondi recorded an interview with Jaques Schott,  which can be found here. It’s interesting viewing, ( with a transcription in German and then. for me, into English, with the aid of an online translation feature)  not least for Szondi’s description of his life’s work. He also remarks upon the criticism he received about his rather Calvinistic approach… implying a sort of asceticism and attempt at anonymity. Overall though, it is an interesting story.

Seeking refuge in New Zealand from Europe – 1938.

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by Christine in 1930s, New Zealand

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applying to New Zealand, Evacuation of refugee analysts, New Zealand's response to refugees during WW2. Australian response to refugees during WW2., refugee analysts seeking a place to go

…there was great difficulty in getting permission, to get in anywhere, and I don’t know what preliminaries were made, but they picked New Zealand first, which would have been largely my father’s choice, I think, he was a passionate hiker, or what do you call it in Australia, bushwalkers, and a field naturalist, and he’d spent most of his free time either walking in the hills or rowing, or on trips on the Danube, or various lakes, and he was prominent in a movement, which still exists, called the (Die Natural Frionde?), that’s German for “Friends of Nature”, which was a Swiss based movement, to give moderately priced outdoor holidays for people who probably wouldn’t be in a position to take them, otherwise, as an answer to the problems of the modern industrialised world…

(Dr George Geroe on his parents, Clara and Vilmos Geroe, 23 August 2013).

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Siegfried Rothmann had his application repeatedly declined. The explanation he received from the naturalisation officer, who was R. A. Lochore, was that his wife’s anti-social behaviour was a problem. The behaviour regarded as anti-social was Mrs Rothmann’s attempts to establish a psychoanalytic practice without gaining a New Zealand medical degree first. In fact, she was legally entitled to do this. Eventually, thanks to the assistance of prominent New Zealanders Jim Roberts and Bob Semple, the Rothmanns did obtain their naturalisation. The Rothmanns were not alone in encountering such difficulties. Refugees and other aliens who were thought not to have adequately participated in the war effort had their applications declined in 1946 and 1947. 

Beaglehole, Ann. A Small Price to Pay: Refugees from Hitler in New Zealand 1936–46 . Bridget Williams Books. Kindle Edition.

(I wish to thank Karin Ruppeldt for drawing my attention to this publication and for her contribution to this post).

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

In 1938 five psychoanalysts wishing to flee from Nazi Europe applied for entry visas into New Zealand: Eva Rosenfeld, Erszebet Kardos, Endre Peto, Edit Gyomeroi and Clara Lazar Geroe. All of them were trained and experienced as child analysts. Four, from Budapest, were members of the Hungarian Psychoanaytical Society. Eva Rosenfeld, a former patient of Freud’s, had worked with Anna Freud in Vienna, where members of the group had met together for seminars with Anna Freud herself. Clara Lazar, a specialist in pedagogic and child analysis, held an appointment with the International Psychoanalytical Society to give lectures to educationalists. The group’s New Zealand contact, made through Ernest Jones in London, was a psychiatrist, Dr Stuart Moore from Dunedin on the South Island. Stuart Moore called upon Dr Mary Barkas for assistance. Barkas, born in Christchurch, was medically trained, and a former Associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She had left New Zealand to train under Dr Otto Rank in the late 1910s and had returned to in the early 1930s. She had given up clinical work by then but continued to support the refugee analysts as they sought to enter her country.

Amongst Clara Geroe’s correspondence is  a  copy of a letter to Dr Moore, dated 2nd December 1938.  Moore chose to delete the names of the participants in these conversations over the future of the five. It is clear though that the writer – perhaps Mary Barkas- was well acquainted with the local culture. How Clara Geroe obtained this letter is a mystery. Perhaps it was forwarded by Ernest Jones as he sought to assist the group’s plans.

The letter begins:

‘I discussed the matter with [the Minister]’. He had wondered whether their situation was as urgent as that for the Austrians or Germans – even though they were likely ‘to have a rather thin time’.

It merited pressing on.

‘On the whole I think it is worth taking some risk in the matter. We can assume I think that genione refugees will prefer personal safety than starvation and the risk of personal violence in Fascist countries’.

The writer was sympathetic to the injustices and local constraints the five would face. Their misfortune, as the New Zealand historian Ann Beaglehole has carefully established in her 2015 book, ‘A Small Price to Pay’ was that they were applying for entry into a country of just over a million settler colonials, into a culture resistant to any other immigrant group than British.

None would be able to work as medical practitioners, the writer continued. They would be required to work ‘as lay/an objectionable term/ non medical psychologists or get a footing here as teachers’, If necessary they would spend a year at a local teacher’s training college. They should be younger than thirty five years, and ‘recognized by the relevant people with personal knowledge of them in England’. Despite their qualifications and experience, ‘it should be clear that apart from a few cases only the briefer and shallower forms of psychotherapy are at present acceptable to NZ professional and public opinion’.

The letter writer was clearly knowledgeable about the needs of New Zealanders and their limitations. Child work was sorely needed. It would be a great thing if an analyst with an educational interest was granted entry… someone similar to Susan Isaacs, the British analyst who had visited the country with the New Education Fellowship in August 1937.A woman had better prospects than a man, the writer said. It would be easier for her to make her way, without being perceived as competing with local people for work.

‘They could win themselves a reasonable financial and societal status within a few years’, the writer continued. ‘Teaching is one of the least crowded of professions – little resentment will be caused by bringing in a few able foreigners’. Support could build up slowly as knowledge spread.

Perhaps, upon reading this letter, Clara Geroe began thinking about her strategy.  If she was able to emigrate to New Zealand she  would start small, she wrote to Ernest Jones in London. That way, the local people would begin to know and trust her work.  Ernest Jones, so strongly committed to seeing as many European analysts settled, wherever they could find a place, supported her view. In his mind the group’s applications and New Zealand’s acceptance them was a foregone conclusion. At least that is what he wrote to them. If anything he had to keep hope alive. It may have been better for everyone had he apprised himself of the realities of the Dominions’ positions. Even the British Government knew better than to prevail upon its former colonies to accept the refugees that no-one else wanted.

Moore’s correspondent seemed surprised that anyone of the analysts would actually choose New Zealand as a destination. If the applicants were not too desperate and ‘could pick and choose’, wouldn’t they ‘be inclined to head for England or the USA’ ? 

But then again, ‘should a well qualified applicant have financial backing, I would be inclined to say by all means come to NZ and set up as a /child/ psychologist. As a starting point I would say one in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch – I am not sure about Dunedin’. This was Stuart Moore’s hometown. ‘It is a small city and you are able to take most of the work that is there….’

In the longer term Stuart Moore was to advise against the group’s migration, suggesting that New Zealanders would not accept their contribution. It was too small, too conservative, too British…

Beaglehole notes that only about 1100 European Jews were accepted into New Zealand prior to Kristallnacht, in November 1939. New Zealand seeking to protect its British Settler culture, closed its doors. The Australian government which had undertaken to accept 30,000 refugees – later halved this intake to 15,000 – eventually accepted about 7000. None of the group was accepted into New Zealand. But amongst the 1100  luckier ones who got accepted to New Zealand was a 5 year old John Steiner with his parents and a baby brother, as refugees from the Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. John Steiner was raised in Wellington until his age 26 and trained at Otago Medical School. He became interested in psychoanalysis as a student. His friend, the son of a professor in education, had the complete works of Freud, which Steiner borrowed and read through. He left New Zealand in 1959 to the US and then the UK, and became a distinguished psychoanalyst in Kleinian tradition.

Encouraged by the ever optimistic Ernest Jones Clara Geroe, Kardos and Peto turned their attention to Australia. But despite strong representations from Duncan Hall, the League of Nations Secretary for the Colonies, none of their applications was accepted by the government. Clara Geroe eventually arrived in Australia on her husband’s application in March 1940. Eva Rosenfeld emigrated to Britain. Edit Gyomeroi wound up in Ceylon. Erszebet Kardos and Endre Peto, who married in 1941, remained in Hungary. Tragically Erszebet was murdered when the Nazis reached Budapest in 1944. She left behind her husband, Endre Peto and their two year old daughter, Agnes. The Peto family, Andrew, with his second wife, Hannah and little Agnes, aged eight,  Hannah’s daughter from a previous marriage, finally reached Australia in 1950.

References:

Mary Barkas, Women Psychoanalysts in Great Britain, https://www.psychoanalytikerinnen.de/greatbritain_biographies.html#Barkas accessed 7 March 2019.

Copy of letter to Stuart Moore dated 2 December 1938. writer not identified. (Geroe Correspondence).

Letter from Clara Lazar Geroe to Ernest Jones, c. March 1939. (Geroe Correspondence)

Ann Beaglehole, A Small Price to Pay: Refugees from Hitler in New Zealand 1936–46. Bridget Williams Books, 2015.

Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Christine Vickers and George Geroe, 23 August 2013. (transcript  in possession of the author).

Susan Isaacs and The New Education Fellowship Conference, August, 1937

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Susan Isaacs

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Child psychology, Child Welfare, children, hidden history of psychoanalysis in Australia, infant mental health, New Education Fellowship conference, Susan Isaacs

Susan Isaacs’ visit to the Antipodes in July, August and September 1937, occupies little more than several pages in biographies about her life and work published so far. But for Australians and New Zealanders it was a rare opportunity. Isaacs’ visit was larger than the New Education Fellowship Conference of which she was a key lecturer even through The conference itself was one of the most significant events in interwar Australia. Throughout the press across Australia Isaacs is recorded as speaking to full houses. She is the delegate who is chosen to be photographed with a koala. Her reunion with her sister after eighteen years would have touched many people who had long left family and friends behind in England. There was something very appealing and human about Susan Isaacs.

susan isaacs 1937

The Telegraph, (Brisbane)  7 August 1937, p. 8

It is hard to write a biography, or any historical work without access to sources.  Inevitably much of the focus in Isaacs’ biographies, of course, is upon her development as a psychologist and teacher in England during the 1920s and 1930s and, from the mid 1930s, as a psychoanalyst. She had completed her initial training and gained full membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1923. In 1927 after meeting Melanie Klein, she entered analysis with another analyst Joan Riviere so as to understand for herself the meaning of Kleinian thinking. Her ability to  argue for the  importance of Klein’s position during the ‘Controversial Discussions’ within the British Psychoanalytical Society during the  early 1940s, and show that unconscious phantasy influences daily life in all people, also led to her seminal paper, ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1943.

Isaacs visit to Australia could be said to have been a significant event in her life, if not her development. Travel was hard in the 1930s. The effort and time needed   meant that such journeys to Australia from England for short periods as several months rather than several years were rare. And Australia was so far away. Dorothy Gardner, Isaacs’ first biographer and a former student, may have suffered from lack of access to sources. Although her visit to Australia is well documented in Australian newspapers, Isaacs did not keep such press clippings for posterity. Had she done so, Gardner would have found records of her speeches, her social engagements and most significantly for Isaacs, her reunion with her younger sister, Alice, who had emigrated to Australia with her husband eighteen years earlier. Gardner’s 1969 account generally highlights the opportunity for Isaacs to renew friendships in the United States. Gardner relates that in New York Isaacs was the guest of the Child Study Association and had the opportunity to travel to Berkeley in California where research was being carried out. In New Zealand Isaacs lectured to audiences in Auckland and Wellington, and Gardner guesses, ”she certainly visited Christchurch and probably the other cities” (p. 116).She was greatly admired by Mr Campbell, the Head of Education in New Zealand, but there is little information about the issues that concerned New Zealand, and Australian, audiences that had resulted in such interest in her work.

Philip Graham, Isaacs 2013 biographer, has little more detail to add. He notes that several delegates, including Isaacs, did not hesitate to criticize the Australian education system. Their recommendations were taken up and used to reform Australian education so that it became more relevant to the two countries, he continues. An important point, also underlined by historian John Godfrey in his 2004 article on the Conference, is the very strong interest in the conference among the Australian public. One motivation for the Conference was the recognition among educators, government and politicians that Australian education was in need of revival.  In his introduction to the Conference proceedings, K S Cunningham of the Australian Council of Education Research, noted that ‘owing no doubt to our remote and somewhat sheltered situation in the world, we had failed to keep up with this forward movement that featured in other parts of the world. This stressed the liberal view of the school’s function in a democratic community, and ‘a recognition of how great a part popular education must play in promoting, not only the well being of individuals, but also the security and well being of nation as a whole’, (Cunningham, 1938, p. 1). Godfrey’s article might be ‘breathless’ in tone, as Graham caustically remarks, but for those in the Antipodes, the conference was part of a larger process of developing Australian nationhood. Rather than remaining dependent upon the old country for direction, Australian educationists sought to develop a system suited to local needs.  The critique provided by Isaacs and her colleagues was sought, if not understood to be part of the arrangement during their visit.

Isaacs was chosen for this role because she was  known to Australian audiences for her work as Principle of the Malting House School where she used the opportunity to record the children’s play and conversations – the basis of her books,  and Intellectual Growth in Young Children, were favourably reviewed in education and psychology circles. In January 1933 the West Australian newspaper published a reviews of The Nursery Years and The Children we Teach was a shorter version of Isaacs’ The Intellectual Growth of Young Children,  was reviewed by  a month later.  Although not named, the author of both items was likely to have been either Professor Cameron, Head of Education at the University of Western Australia or Professor Fowler, who led the Psychology department.  Isaacs’ book, ‘Social Development in Young Children also carefully reviewed in the West Australian, in November 1933. Isaacs’ points, that children had individual, emotional lives of their own, that all behaviour had meaning and that this could be understood in terms of children’s psychical development and internal phantasy life, were new ideas for people brought up with the notion that the task of a parent was to train and mould children into adulthood.

It is not as if Isaacs’ ideas about education were unknown, generally. When South Australian psychologist and educationist, Lois Allen returned in 1928 after nine years in England, her experience as a teacher at Malting House for two terms  was impressed upon readers of the Adelaide News. Allen stressed the recognition and enablement of the differing abilities of each of the children.  Perhaps this idea was not as ‘taken for granted’ in 1928 where rote learning was the norm, as it is in the twentyfirst century.  Malting House, Allen explained,

was a small experimental school for research and the children were between three and eight years of age. The object was to study the problems of children with a view to making better use of the natural curiosity with which those this age are endowed. They were allowed to investigate the realities of nature and had a little laboratory where they experimented with crucibles, bunsen burners, and so on, so that knowledge of scientific phenomena might be instilled in the early years. Among the children was a grandson of Sir Ernest Rutherford, the noted physicist. It was most interesting to notice the extreme difference between the children, and to observe the trend of each mind towards artistic or scientific subjects.

Isaacs had her own reasons for accepting the invitation to visit Australia from the Australian Council of Education Research. Professionally she was interested in Aboriginal culture and what might be learned about the human mind. She was deeply familiar with the work of Geza Roheim and later lectured on this to students of psychoanalysis. A second, more personal reason was the opportunity to see her younger sister Alice who had emigrated to Australia shortly after her marriage eighteen years earlier. The two travelled together for part of the tour, at least and in Brisbane stayed together in accommodation at the Women’s College at Kangaroo Point. Isaacs had been ill with cancer during 1935 and 1936. It was a rare opportunity to see her beloved sister and to take time from her psychoanalytic  work.

There were opportunities for Isaacs, too. She had the opportunity to broacast several of her talks to people living in remote rural areas – the outback. At the end of her Brisbane stay Isaacs reflected that

In England, there Is not such a thing as a woman radio announcer, and one- of the ‘moat pleasant recollections I will take away from Queensland will be of a broadcast talk I gave from the national station to the Country Women’s Association last Thursday, during which I had how wisely the Influence of the women’s session was being used to benefit the women of Queensland.

There were further opportunities for radio broadcasting, in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Universty of Adelaide. Perhaps Isaacs’ appeal, along with the intellectual integrity she brought to her work, was that she spoke to people about the very real concern of raising children. Her efforts to translate complex psychological ideas into plain English, the research which underpinned her analyses and her preparedness to communicate in a variety of ways contributed to peoples’ desire to learn more about thinking, human development and relationships. She spoke about infant development, telling audiences about the investigations that were occurring into the mental life of infants. Her concern, to help people to think about children’s behavior, found audiences in unexpected places.

REFERENCES

BOOK REVIEWS. PSYCHOLOGY OF CHILDREN. “The Children We Teach,” by Susan Isaacs, M.A., D.Sc. University of London Press.The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954) Saturday 21 January 1933 p 4 Article

BOOK REVIEWS. (1933, February 25). The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954), p. 4. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32488480

BOOK REVIEWS. (1933, November 25). The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – Preview Post1954), p. 4. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32774408

Psychology of Infants. (1937, August 4). The Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. : 1872 – 1947), p. 9 Edition: CITY FINAL LAST NEWS. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184565332

When a Child Is Obstinate And Defiant. (1937, August 5). The Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. : 1872 – 1947), p. 10 Edition: CITY FINAL LAST MINUTE NEWS. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184565910

The Telegraph, ( Brisbane, Qld: 1872-1947) Saturday 7 August 1937, page 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184564179 accessed 3 June 2015.

Cunningham, K S, ed; (1938), Education for Complete Living: The Challenge of Today – The Proceedings of the New Education Fellowship Conference held in Australia August 1, 1937 – Setpember 20, 1937, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1938.

Gardner, D E M ( 1969), Susan Isaacs: The First Biography, London, Methuen Educational Ltd.

Godfrey, Johm (2004), Perhaps the most important and certainly the most exciting event in the whole history of education in Australia. History of Education Review, 33, 45-58.

Graham, Philip,( 2013) Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children, London, Karnac

The Radical Australian Journalist and the American Psychiatrist: Cyril Pearl Interviews Dr Anita Muhl – 1938

26 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by Christine in 1930s

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AnitaMuhl, Apparent women's isues, Australian Women's Weekly, child develpment, child psychiatry, Cyril Pearl, Psychology as an instrument of social change, Radical Press, social reform and psychology, Susan Isaacs in Australia

Late in 1938 the American psychiatrist Dr Anita Muhl arrived  in Melbourne for a three year contract to teach and lecture about child development and children’s problems. It created something of a stir amongst Melbourne’s auxiliary ladies fundraising groups and the medical, teaching and welfare fraternities.  Her appointment was  something of a coup for her sponsor Una Cato, who undertook to fund Muhl for the entire period of her stay. Cato, whose father had made his fortune as a grocer, was dedicating her philanthropic effort to the psychiatric field.She later trained as a psychiatrist. Too.

Under the terms of her agreement and in accordance with legalities concerning the registration of overseas trained medical doctors, Muhl was not able to practise as a psychiatrist. Instead she took over the directorship of the “Association for the Understanding of Human Adjustments’ founded by Cato. She brought a library of books and journals  especially for her visit – even though war had been declared. Australian customs officials  confiscated these books  pending further inquiry. They were returned  after representations were made through the United States Embassy in Canberra.

Over the next three years Muhl’s  lectures and tutorials on human development were given to interested groups – legal, medical, nursing, teaching professionals; hospital auxiliaries, medical students and welfare professionals.  She was available to the general public through radio broadcasts, letters, newspaper reportage and, not surprisingly through the very well known women’s paper The Australian Women’s Weekly. The ‘Weekly,’ now part the National Library’s digitsied, online newspaper collection, TROVE provides a rich insight into contemporary issues about Australian family life. Amongst its reportage were items on child development, psychology and education, as well as broader political and social commentary on the issues of the day. It is not surprising that Muhl was profiled in an illustrated article published in November 1938.

What is surprising is the choice of author.To twentyfirst century readers the  journalist Cyril Pearl  seems an unlikely choice for a subject of this nature. His leftist views were known even then. He was about to  take up an appointment as the Editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph and in this capacity  challenged the government on its censorship laws in 1942. His radicalism subsequently matured into membership of the Communist Party and, amongst other things the production of a body of writing about working class Australian culture. After his resignation from the Telegraph he pursued a career as a historian and writer. Pearl’s 1970 biographical study, Morrison of Peking, about The Times Peking correspondent and, from 1912 later political advisor to the newly formed Chinese Government, drew considerable controversy and the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ( ASIO). Pearl’s ASIO file reveals little other than the opinion of his comrades that he drank too much.

Pearl’s interst  may have been Muhl’s views on psychology as a tool for social change and, perhaps, the question about how it was that a ‘well bred’ American girl could come to hold the views she did and travel as widely as she did. Framing Muhl’s professional identity as a medical practitioner and psychiatrist  with contemporary notions of femininity: she was once a ‘little blue-eyed girl who  wanted to know how things worked’, he highlighted her own version of advocacy for social change. She became an adult woman with a distinguished career who, despite her achievements was’ still curious’ and ‘whose eyes were still blue’. It is the kind of stuff that would hardly go down well with feminists these days even though Muhl typified the ‘new woman’ of the twentieth century American middle classes. Like many of her contemporaries in the social columns of the daily papers, her life as a single woman, was centred upon home with her parents. She was educated, had travelled to exotic places about which she was prepared to lecture, but her identity and moral conduct also rested in this family circle. But her views resonated with Pearl’s vision for a better, and more just society. Pearl’s interest was in her committment to the  the use of psychology and psychiatry as part of a broader response to emerging social dislocation amongst young people in industrialised societies such as America and Australia.

 Psychiatry means the study of people who for some reason or other have failed to adjust themselves to the world around them, and in criminology or the scientific study of crime you see the results of this mental maladjustment…When a hungry man steals a loaf of bread it is easy enough to understand his motive, but not all crime has such simple causes. We find young boys and girls who have never known want doing criminal acts, and it is our job to probe for the causes.

We are tackling this problem in America by providing civic recreational projects. Groups of expert psychologists and educationists plan child recreation scientifically so as to help the child to discover himself and the satisfaction of self-expression “From the child who makes mud pies to the child who makes clay vases and decorates them is only a step, and from the child who plays a game of make-believe with a rag doll to the child who writes a play and acts in it is only another step.The object of our educational projects is to help the child to make these steps and to realise that beyond them lies an infinite number of rich and satisfying experiences.

Unlike a newspaper with a life of a day, the Weekly was distributed Australia wide with a potential life of more than a week as it was passed between family members, friends and relatives for reading. By the 1930s psychology was well established as a subject at university and teaching training colleges. Almost everyone had heard of Freud and the idea of the unconscious and whether they were conscious of it or not, the recasting of the child in psychological terms was well established. During 1937 the New Education Fellowship Conference had traversed the continent. The twentyone delegates had presented lectures in each of the capital cities. One of them, Susan Isaacs, the British Psychoanalyst and Educationalist, had been a key speaker, drawing large audiences to her lectures as well as a multitude of listeners to her radio broadcasts. Her message, that child behaviour is to be understood as a communication at an emotional level, was part of a broader psychological recasting of the nature of childhood and the responsibilities of education and parenthood. Anita Muhl’s visit, following so soon after this event, was important enough for wider reportage than the local metropolitan press. Perhaps Pearl held the view that Muhl’s Australian sojourn was part of this process of enlightenment.

REFERENCES

Anita Muhl, Correspondence, 1938-1942, State Library of Victoria, MS MS 11459

WORLD’S No. 1 School TO MEET. (1937, April 17). The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), p. 24. Retrieved May 26, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article52246132

Youth Saved From Life of Crime. (1939, January 28). The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), p. 14. Retrieved May 9, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article51591527

Cyril Pearl ( 1970) Morrison of Peking, Penguin Books.

Theatre For Children and the Freudian Influence – A Guest Posting from Dr John McIntyre

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Children's Theatre, Education, Susan Isaacs

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childhood, children, contributions of emigres to Australian Culture, New Education, Psychoanalysis in Education and Theatre, refugees, Rosemarie Benjamin, Susan Isaacs, Sydney Children's Theatre, Theatre in education, what have we found here?

I am delighted to introduce my first guest posting. Dr John McIntyre, a Canberra based education research and policy consultant  and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra has kindly accepted my invitation to write a post for this blog. His subject is Rosemary Benjamin and influence of Susan Isaacs in Sydney’s Theatre for Children during the 1930s.

A brief exploration through Google shows that John McIntyre has worked for over 25 years in the professional preparation of adult and vocational educators at the University of Technology Sydney where he was a senior researcher and Director in the UTS Research Centre for Vocational Education and Training.  His research has focused on outcomes and participation in ACE in Australia, much of it commissioned by government. He has also published work on early school leavers and equity strategies of VET providers, research methodology and policy and research relationships in adult education.His recent work includes ‘Client engagement in a learner-centred system’ and a feasibility study on a national internet portal for adult learners. In 2007 he evaluated the Victorian ACE Research Circles for the  Adult, Community and Further Education Board, Engagement, Knowledge and Capability:Connecting Research and Policy to Practice. These and other publications can be found on his website.

John McIntyre is also deeply interested in theatre and the arts. After reading my posts about Susan Isaacs’ Australian tour in 1937 here and here, John contacted me with information about Rosemary Benjamin and the influence of Susan Isaacs’ thinking in the the Children’s Theatre Benjamin created in Sydney during the 1930s. You can find some more about Benjamin at this lovely site: http://www.artpages.com.au

Here is John McIntyre’s post….

Recently I have been exploring the history of the Theatre for Children, Sydney,  that was founded and directed for one twenty years by an Englishwoman of Jewish background, Rosemary Benjamin (1901-1957).

Arriving in Sydney in late 1936, Benjamin soon made friends with Jewish emigrés from Europe including the Finkes, the psychoanalysts whose daughter Ruth acted in the theatre, Gertrud Bodenwieser, the leading exponent of expressionist dance and composer and musician Sydney John Kaye (Kurt Kaiser). Rosemarie Benjamin is another link in the story of ‘Freud in Oceania’.

By the time she began her Sydney work, Rosemarie Benjamin had developed her ideas about appropriate theatrical performance for children, ideas formed by early twentieth century progressive education and profoundly influenced by Freudian thinking in London of the 1930s. For Benjamin’s generation, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious enriched new ideas of play, creativity and development and contributed to the ferment of the ’new education’ in a way that is now hard to appreciate.

Benjamin believed that children’s theatre should be authentic, performed as serious theatre by adult actors in plays and draw deeply upon myth and fairy-tale. Through such theatre, children could encounter their inner conflicts in symbolic terms, identifying with characters expressing ‘difficult’ emotions of guilt, fear, anxiety and horror. Allegorical figures drawn from myth could act as intermediaries in this cathartic process.  Authentic theatre understood in this way could serve the expressive needs of children and ‘child development’.  These ideas are outlined fully in Benjamin’s ‘Story of the Theatre for Children’ (available on-line at the State Library of Victoria).

In the years 1925-1936 Benjamin as a young woman was working as a play organiser for the London County Council, a new kind of educational work, while seriously pursuing a career in drama, twin strands that eventually merged in children’s theatre. Benjamin’s narrative always highlights her 1930s visit to Soviet Russia to study children’s theatre as a life-changing experience, though her explanations of children’s theatre are wholly Freudian.

Who influenced this Freudian strand in Benjamin’s thinking? In 1930s London, Benjamin must have come in contact with the leading edge of Freudian thought as it was being absorbed in progressive education, when Susan Isaacs was coming to prominence. Though direct evidence in Benjamin’s papers is lacking, I think there are three clear indications of Isaacs’ influence:

  •  Benjamin emphasises emotions, especially difficult emotions (fear, guilt, anxiety, aggression) and the way these can be called forth in expressive play. Theatre employing plays based on myths and fairy tales permits children to encounter and deal symbolically with such forces. A broad understanding of phantasy (as it was later outlined by Isaacs in her famous 1948 article) appears to be assumed.
  • Isaacs discovered that ‘new education’ rather than being wholly permissive, children need to have a structured context to help them manage the expression of difficult emotions. Benjamin is insistent that theatre performances need to be structured with devices that help the child to respond to reactions aroused by the play. Such devices include allegorical figures like ‘Jester’ that ‘come in front of the curtain’ act as intermediaries between the real world and the fantastic world of the play. 
  • There is a commitment to systematic observational of children’s experiences as a way of testing and informing theoretical understandings. Benjamin encouraged audience participation and practised the serious study of children’s responses to characters to inform the crafting of performance. Underlying this is a strong conviction about the developmental value of children’s theatre.

It may also be that Susan Isaacs (as a columnist and educator) gave Benjamin the inspiration to promote new ideas to the wider audience, for Benjamin was a tireless advocate of her cause, and quite possibly a better publicist than producer. 

At the end of 1936, Benjamin left London for a Sydney holiday. By then, Isaacs was leading the new department of child development at University of London and had published two defining works in the field. She was a leading figure in the New Education Fellowship which the next year held its World Congress in Australian cities, with Isaacs as a key member. 

In Sydney, Benjamin no doubt participated in the Congress, and she was on the NSW committee of the NEF until the war years. This World Congress contributed much to enthusiasm for new educational thinking in Australia, and this took place alongside other streams of cultural modernism permeating the Antipodes. Benjamin must found among her Jewish emigré friends a congenial milieu in which her own novel enterprise might prosper. She returned briefly to Europe after the war for a study tour, but after resuming her work in Sydney suffered a long illness before she died in London in 1957.

Enquiries: John McIntyre, john@artpages.com.au

References

Benjamin (c1949)  ‘The Story of the Theatre for Children’. FilmStrip NSW. On-line at

digital.slv.vic.gov.au/dtl_publish/pdf/marc/3/2125895.html).

Free Education. Profile of Susan Isaacs. http://free-educations.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/educator-profile-susan-isaacs-18851948.html

McIntyre, J. (2014). Rosemarie Benjamin and the Theatre for Children in Sydney, 1937-1957. [Journal article, submitted]. Available at http://www.artpages.com.au/Theatre_for_Children/Theatre_For_Children.html

The Visit of Anita Muhl, Psychiatrist, to Melbourne: 1939-1941

08 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by Christine in 1930s, 1940s, Psychiatry

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Anita Muhl, British Medical Association, Child Welfare, Clara Geroe, learning about human behaviour, nursing, Public Education, response of the general public to these ideas., Social Work, teaching, Una Cato, University of Melbourne

In her 2005 book, Freud in the Antipodes,, Joy Damousi writes of the visit of the American Psychiatrist, Dr Anita Muhl, to Australia from Feruary 1939 to the end of 1941, to provide education and consultation about human behaviour and relationships to professionals and lay people. Damousi’s analysis concerns Muhl’s role as a ‘listener’ as people either poured out their hearts to her sometimes in long letters, or curious, sought Muhl’s opinion on about an aspect of their lives – whether about a dream or a difficulty they were having. Damousi’s thesis, that this reflected the development of a ‘listening culture’ co inciding with the emergence of Freud’s ideas in the early decades of the twentieth century, is developed here.

Upon looking at the very rich archive of her visit, it becomes clear that Muhl’s three years living in Melbourne attracted considerable interest from groups and people who were interested in the developing mind  and were seeking ways in which to further that understanding. Muhl was not the first international expert in child development and psychology field to spend time in the country. Susan Isaac’s six week visit to Australia in 1937, as a speaker at the New Education Fellowship Conference,  had put a face to the author and magazine columnist expert on child development. And since the early 1920s psychology courses at the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland Adelaide and Western Australia, all  included a strong component of psychoanalysis in their psychology or education programs. 

Looking through the archive  the question about where  to find help for psychological distress and from whom to seek it, was a common question in the letters from the public – that have been included on the file. Some writers stated explicitly that they had found no one able to help them. Part of the the agreement made for Muhl’s visit was that she was not able to practice. Her focus was to be teach, lecturing and consultation. Muhl’s visit also intersected with the arrival of  Australia’s first training analyst, Clara Lazar Geroe, in March 1940 and the formation of the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis in October that year. Geroe, too, was to find a sophisticated and receptive audience.

Muhl’s visit was at the invitation of Una Cato,  the daughter of philanthropist Frederick Cato, who had made his fortune as a grocer. The idea of a visit was developed between Una Cato and Anita Muhl during the latter’s stay at the Cato residence during the latter part of 1937. At this time she was wending her way back to the United States after a prolonged world tour. Muhl subsequently related that when Cato suggested she return for a tour of lecturing and teaching, she had replied that she would come for three years, all expenses paid. Cato had the means to enable this.

First Cato did her research, ascertaining the degree of interest in a possible visit from Muhl from amongst the medical. legal, education, medical and psychological professionals.   Amongst the people she met with during March 1938 were psychiatrist, Dr John Williams, the educators, Christine Heinig and Kenneth Cunningham, the philanthropist, Sir Herbert Brooks, British Medical Association President and paediatrician, Dr Kingsley Norris and Mrs Rapke, whom Cato listed as ‘Magistrate at the Juvenile Court’. At this time Julia Rapke, well known in feminist circles, was forming the Women Justices Association of Victoria. Some were enthusiastic, without knowing much about the subject. Others were more circumspect. Christine Heinig wondered about Muhl’s training: was she familiar with the work of Melanie Clyne (sic) she wondered? Others checked her qualifications while remarking on her good sense, sanity and tact – observations made during her short visit in 1937. Cato was able to gain support from these senior people, providing assurance Muhl would not be practising psychiatry with patients during her visit. In turn they wondered what venue would be best for her. And she met with people at the university. An honorary post meant she would work for free, one consultant noted. A university appointment would be due recognition of her qualities and skills, another noted. In the end Muhl retained her independence. She took up residence in a building called Kia-Ora, along St Kilda Road. Outside the trams rattling by her doorstep provided access to the city. Under the heading, ‘Director of the Association for the Understanding of Human Adjustments’.

Muhl made herself available for lectures to women’s auxiliaries, schools, medical people, nurses and legal practitioners.Nursing groups who invited her to speak to them more often than not chose to hear Muhl’s thoughts on the serious matter of Mental Hygiene rather than the option she provided, an account of her visits to India or Iceland. Women’s auxiliary groups fundraising for hospitals, mental institutions and welfare organizations sought her out for lectures; she lectured to social workers, psychologists, teachers and educationalists, probation officers, and held reading and discussion groups for women doctors. Members of the (male) medical fraternity also sought her opinion and invited her to lecture to them.  She provided pieces for the Women’s section on the Australian Broadcasting Commission and negotiated her way through Melbourne Society. She was able to say ‘no’ to those who wished to use her to prop up their social status; and to invitations she considered irrelevant to her purpose. At the same time she seems to have gone out of her way to oblige – for example, accepting an invitation from a newly formed mother’s group at one of Melbourne’s maternal and child health centres.

As news of her presence and knowledge spread people wrote to her about their problems. We do not know how many people wrote to her. The letters that remain are remarkable for their thoughtfulness as writers puzzled over their problems and invited Muhl to puzzle with them. One, written by Rose Currie in late 1939 provides a glimpse of the hardships and anxiety experienced by women living in isolated places. It also suggests the mental effort needed as people sought to understand their minds.

Rose Currie wrote:
I am no longer young and I am a daughter of pioneer parents, on land, in Gippsland. I wonder if your ‘Mental Hygiene’ would conquer a disability such as emotional tears?

For many years I was associated with public life. I still am associated with local affairs, and a struggle with tears is a perfect nuisance in some circumstances. It is not that I have not, and do not try to overcome this disability. It cramps one’s style greatly. I have thought it is because of the great stress of pioneer days on the land, among the tall timbers, which my mother experienced. Fear of Bushfires in summer, Storms in winter and all the anxieties associated with her young family and dangers with stock, etc.

I would appreciate greatly your opinion if fears in a mother can be transmitted to a child, and, if, even in middle age, it can be overcome by Mental Hygiene and Prayer?

Rose Currie had heard Muhl  read the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi during one of her radio broadcasts. Could she have a copy? Muhl was happy to oblige. In her letter to Currie she assured her that infants did, indeed, pick up upon and reflect mother’s moods and state of mind.

In January 1940, the author and poet Celia Albrey wrote to her:

Will you let me know if your Association deals with individual problems in psychological neurosis and maladjustment? Mine is a problem of some five years standing – a psychological ‘hold-up’ in creative work following a period of tragedy and manifesting itself in severe physical illness whenever I try to overcome it and I feel that modern knowledge and common sense should overcome it but it is beyond me unaided.

My chief difficulty in this state is that I do not know whom to consult and I know it is no job for a layman practitioner. If such individual cases are outside the scope of your distinguished work will you let me know of a specialist here (in Melbourne) whom I could consult?

Muhl replied she was unable to practice and recommended Dr Alice Barber or Dr Selby Link as possibilities.

In a sense Muhl’s visit, to educated and consult was timely. If the two letter writers are any reflection of the public at that time, both were groping towards the understanding of something within themselves, perceived, but hard to grab, was moving them. Perhaps they were aware of Freud’s theories of repression from reading and listening to radio broadcasts they felt free to admit that understanding was beyond their conscious awareness. Muhl was the expert where no other could be found.

 

References:

Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, Sydney UNSW Press, 2005.

Dr Anita Muhl Correspondence 1939-41, MS 11459. State Library of Victoria.

Letter from Rose Currie, 10 October 1939, Anita Muhl Correspondence, MS 11459, Box 1765/6, State Library of Victoria.

Letter from Celia Albrey, 5 January 1940, Anita Muhl Correspondence, MS 11459, Box 1765/1, State Library of Victoria.

Susan Isaacs with the Delegates and their Wives at the New Education Fellowship Conference in New Zealand 1937

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Susan Isaacs

≈ 2 Comments

How interesting it is to see the place of women in England and the colonies during the 1930s.  As a world renowned expert on child development, London psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs, a follower of Melanie Klein, was invited to speak at the 1937 New Education Fellowship Conference, an international movement founded by Beatrice Ensor in 1914. A reaction against the  boring rote-learning styles of the nineteenth centuries it  sought to encourage children find their own path in education. On the antipodean leg of its tour from Europe via America the conference travelled first to New Zealand before embarking on a national tour of Australia in August and September 1937. There was considerable interest in Isaacs from among the women’s movement, a group whose work also supported developments in child guidance and psychology. Unlike the Australian press coverage in which there are few, if any images, New Zealand editors included photographs in their reportage. She was one of two women delegates in a band of 21 who toured Australia and New Zealand: the other was Beatrice Ensor the Fellowship’s founder. Was it possible that she was photographed with the delegates’ wives, because it fitted, somehow, with the way things were done, then. Despite these reservations it means we can images of Isaacs  very different from the studio shots featured on the 2009 biography by Philip Graham: Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children.

.Front Cover

Isaacs incorporated Klein’s theories of children’s phantasy life into her work on education and child development. She believed that one could not be a psychoanalyst without such an understanding. Like Melanie Klein and later, D W Winnicott, Isaacs was influenced by the observational work undertaken in the 1920s by Merrell Middlemore, an obstetrician, trained psychoanalyst and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Middlemore’s work. ‘The Nursing Couple’ recording closely observed interactions between newborns and their mother in hospital was published in 1941, three years after her sudden death from cardiac failure in 1938. In an interview for the Melanie Klein Trust the late Hannah Segal acknowledges Isaacs’s interpretations of Klein’s work, particularly her seminal paper, ‘The nature and function of phantasy’ published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29, 1948, 73-97.

The New Education Fellowship Conference landed first in New Zealand on 10 July 1937. These were renowned experts, with a few professorships and knighthoods amongst them. The photograph, taken from the New Zealand Herald, 12 July 1937, p.12 is not fully annotated although the image of Susan Isaacs is clearly shown in the top left hand corner photograph. The first photograph on the top left-hand corner shows, L-R: Dr Harold Rugg, Professor of Education, Columbia University, New York;  Sir Percy Meadon, Director of Education, Lancashire, UK;  Dr Cyril Norwood,President, Sir Johns College, Oxford; Dr Susan Isaacs, Psychoanalyst and Head of Department of Child Development, University of London; Professor De S. Brunner, Professor of Education, Columbia University, Mr G.T. Hankin representing the Board of Education at the University of London; and Mr Laurin Zilliacus from Finland, Chairman of the NEF. The others show delegates doing spot of sight seeing, having lunch and generally socializing. They are rugged up in coats and hats because it was mid winter in the antipodes.

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It was the way of things  that women were treated separately to men. Delegates’ wives were a separate group. Both Susan Isaacs and Beatrice Ensor who founded the NEF in 1914 were  included amongst them. The photographs below, from top down show ‘Mrs E Salter Davies’ and ‘Mrs C.M Wilson’. Susan Isaacs is pictured on the lower photograph with ‘Mrs E. de.S. Brunner and ‘Mrs P.L Dengler’.  In the lead up to the war the Dengler’s presence created some controversy and tension amongst the delegates: they had come from Vienna in Germany.

 

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Isaacs’s lectures drew large audience. The Herald reported that of over 1600 attendees at the entire conference of twenty one delegates, 500 had enrolled for Isaacs’s talks on infancy and the pre-school child.( NZ Herald 6 July 1937). Likewise in Australia, Isaacs drew large audiences and, in Canberra, spoke at the Albert Hall, introduced by the Governor General’s wife, Lady Whiskard. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Adelaide. She returned to England where she became more deeply involved in the psychoanalytic movement. She died in 1948 from the cancer she had first developed in 1936.

 

Women in Paediatrics and finding Melanie Klein -1930.

03 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Christine in 1930s

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Child Welfare, childhood, infancy, infant mortality, Kleinian theory, melanie klein in Australia, welfare, women in paediatrics

During the 1920s and 1930s it was the habit of newspaper reporters to meet the ships from England when they reached Australian shores. Briefed, perhaps, upon passengers of interest and status, reporters in each port – Fremantle in Western Australia, Adelaide in South Australia, Melbourne and, finally, Sydney, generally provided a short sketch of these distinguished passengers along with a photograph if space permitted. It was one way for the locals to learn about the goings on abroad. Each passenger, chosen for their achievement in their particular field, was returning with knowledge.  Dr Kathleen Costello, a paediatrician specialising in infant development was one of them. In August 1930 she was returning to Australia, accompanied by her parents, after four and a half years pursuing medical studies in London and Europe.

I wonder whether some of these journalists were following a formula, impressing readers with the notion that their subjects had gone through the proper hoops abroad?. Kathleen Costello had gone to the right university and schools in pursuit of her career as a doctor and paediatrician. It seems to have suited the reporters that she followed the path of her male peers.

The West Australian broke the news. Costello was  one of a cohort of medical students who studied at  Charing Cross Hospital after completing studies at the University of London, it reported on August 19. She appears to have done the rounds of a typical medical student. After a term as house physician at the hospital after finishing her degree – she was the first Australian appointed thus, the reporter noted – she moved on to the Great Ormond Hospital for Sick Children and then accepted a position as house physician at the Infants Hospital at Westminster headed by Eric Pritchard, regarded as a foremost authority on Infant development and care.

It is interesting to read his 1914 book, ‘The Infant: Nutrition and Management,’ a summary of his work towards lowering infant mortality, for the ideas he encouraged in his students. During the first decades of the twentieth century medical practitioners turning their minds  to reduce infant mortality included the Australian Helen Mayo. Part of the cause, they said, was lack of education. Other causes – illegitimacy, alcoholism ( babies smothered by mothers too drunk to notice the babe’s presence in the bed) and poverty. Pritchard had much to say on this. He laid out his principles nutrition and feeding, clothing and washing, airing and whether or not to allow a baby to cry.

Listen to Pritchard…

If infants are breastfed the feedings must be given at absolutley regular intervals and at not too short intervals; the infants must not sleep in the same beds as their mothers, and they must be fed not more than once at night, preferably not at all. They must not be wrapped up in too many clothes; they must not have stiff binders which impede movement, and when it is added that they must be regularly bathed, regularly aired and regularly exercised, it may almost be claimed that all the canons of good motherhood have been enumerated.

But then he continues, much to the horror of twentyfirst century people well versed in the psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory…

Infants do not die because they do not receive enough food; they die because they are fed irregularly or too often, or because they are given too much. They do not die because they are exposed to the cold, they die because they are kept too much indoors with doors and windows closely sealed; they die because the have too many clothes, not because they shiver in rags…

and, most contentiously to us now, Pritchard continued;

they do not die because they are unloved and uncared for, they die because they are rocked and nursed and comforted too much; they die, in fact, for want of the exercise of good mothercraft, and not from poverty and starvation.

Was it such advice as this that prompted notions of the strictly four hourly feed and along with it the phenomenon of New Zealander, Truby King whose advocacy of the strict four hourly feed is a ghost we would like to lay to rest? Or are we seeing the worries of a generation of people who were beginning to realise that the babies who died could have been saved?

Eager to gain experience, at appears, Costello then moved to Europe – to Zurich and then Vienna to spend some time at the Pirquet Clinic – for infants and children.

Baron von Pirquet,born in 1867, is best known for his work in bacteriology, immunology and paediatrics and is remembered for his development of the concept of allergy. His research focussed on children: his clinic in Vienna was the centre of his research and teaching. Students  from all over the world sought experience under his aegis including the future psychoanalyst and infant researcher, Margaret Mahler. It was a mixed blessing for this brilliant clinician whose work on psychological development in infancy would become seminal.  Her biographer, Alma Halbert Bond, relates that Pirquet’s charm and charisma featured alongside his unwillingness to work with women on an equal basis. His research was scientifically thorough but, to Mahler’s consternation, he saw only the physical side of the infant’s condition. He was unwilling to admit the contribution and the importance of warm, human relationships  for infants’ survival, if he noticed these at all.

Bond writes of Mahler’s relief when she began at the Moll Well Baby Clinic after departing from Pirquet’s Clinic in the mid 1920s. Mothers and babies were seen as a unit. They were kept together, even when the baby was sick. If there was no mother available, a ‘mothering person, a consistent caregiver, remained with the infant during her time at the clinic. For Moll, ‘love was the mental vitamin’ the key to survival and for the babies as for all humans the reason to live. A similar observation had been made by social reformer Florence  Davenport Hill in England during the 1860s and, in Australia, by social reformer and writer, Catherine Helen Spence and her colleague Vida Goldstein during the course of a Congress of workers amongst state children held in Adelaide in 1909. Love, they said, was crucial, if a child was to do well. Children who were boarded out fared better in life than children who lived in institutions.

Back to Kathleen Costello. When she reached her destination the Sydney Morning Herald reporter asked a few more questions. He, or was it she? reached beyond the expected story and found out that her journey had not been an easy one. She was a woman, and maybe had landed in places, such as Pirquet’s Clinic where they were not welcome as colleagues. Perhaps as a result she was open to the ideas from the new psychology and psychoanalysis. In a piece published on  26 August 1930, Kathleen Costello spoke of the work being undertaken by Melanie Klein who had arrived in London in 1926. The reporter quoted her:

‘Wonderful child psychology works are being done in England. Everyone is particularly interested in the original methods of one doctor, Frau Klein, who works on a system of her own. She lets the children play in a huge play ground in her own house, and watches them at their games, sometimes giving them set games to play. She then treats them according to their behaviour. She has had remarkable results, especially with intractable children. She does not beat about the bush, with parents, either.’

Klein’s work recognised the early experiences of infancy as they negotiated the passage from birth to early childhood. The relationship between mother and infant was critical for the infant’s developing sense of selfhood. It lent support to theorists, such as Mahler, who recognised a link between so called ‘juvenile delinquency’ and problematic maternal-infant relationships.

In contrast with the easy brilliance of her European career implied by earlier newspaper reports, life was tough for women doctors in Europe. Costello said, ‘Women doctors must be prepared to cruise round a good deal, and find things out for themselves. Lecture courses in Vienna took much less time, but were not so thorough as the British…  The difficulty in England was to get resident positions….

I do not know what happened to Kathleen Costello other than she set up a practice in Sydney shortly afterwards. Whether she married, changed her name, or remained in the profession I cannot ascertain… but as I pursue the unfolding story of psychoanalysis in Australia her remarks about Melanie Klein are prescient.

References

Eric Pritchard, ( 1914). The infant. Nutrition and management. Retrieved from: https://archive.org/details/infantnutritionm00pritrich  2 November 2013.

Wagner, Richard. (1964). Clemens von Pirquet, discoverer of the concept of allergy. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 40(3), 229-235. Access from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1750523/, 3 November 2013.

The West Australian, 20 August 1930

The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 1930;

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