Category Archives: 1930s

Susan Isaacs and The New Education Fellowship Conference in Queensland, August1937

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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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

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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.

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 in 1930s, Children's Theatre, Education, Susan Isaacs

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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 in 1930s, 1940s, Psychiatry

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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 in 1930s, Susan Isaacs

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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.

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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 in 1930s

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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;

“The Mental Life of Infants” – Dr Susan Isaacs’s Australian Tour, 1937.

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1930s, Conferences and Lectures, educational theory, Infancy, Susan Isaacs, western australia

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British Psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs, an associate of Melanie Klein, was one of fourteen international speakers – and one of two women in the list – in the New Education Fellowship Conference which proceeded around Australia from July to September 1937. After a stint in New Zealand, the Congress, hosting about 50 delegates from 15 countries was one of the largest Australia had seen. At this time the Fellowship, founded by the other woman delegate –  French born, English Educationalist, Beatrice Ensor in 1914 – had 51 national groups, including Japan, and published 23 magazines in 15 languages. The New Education Fellowship rejected discipline and drill methods of education. Rather it utilised ideas from Theosophy, Jungian Psychology and Psychoanalysis to stress the need for educationists to develop methods resonant with children’s’ developmental needs. The first session was held in Brisbane in early August 1937 before delegates returned to Sydney to convene from 9 to 16 August. The Conference then continued in Canberra from 18 to 21 August – an interlude before moving onto Melbourne for another strenuous period. Then it was to move onto South Australia and then Perth where Professor Robert Cameron was organising the event. The Federal Government underwrote the conference to the tune of 1250 pounds.

Isaacs combined her official visit with the opportunity to visit her sister in Sydney. It is clear, through perusal of newspaper reports of the Congress that Isaacs’s lectures – given at each port – were well regarded, attended and reported in each of the states. What is of interest is the differences between the east, where clearly Isaacs was the guest of women’s  organisations such as the National Council of Women in Sydney and the West – Adelaide and Perth where the organising committee was largely drawn from the University of Western Australia as well as the Educational and Maternal and Child Health Sector.

Isaacs was welcomed in Canberra  where she was a guest of the British High Commissioner and his wife, Sir George and Lady Whiskard. Clearly there was a desire, if not hunger amongst these Canberra people to learn from her. Isaacs’s lecture on Child Psychology was well patronized: by senior members of Canberra society, by mothers whose children were cared for in a crèche especially organised for the day, and by maternal and infant nurses who closed their centres to attend. Her lecture, pitched at the general public, reached for the link between emotional world of children and behavioural expression. The reporter summarised:

Isaacs referred to the enormous field covered by child psychology and the many intricacies of the subject.. There are many schools of thought in” child psychology and she stressed the need for a ‘balanced view-point and the danger of adopting a method of child training that was partial and extreme’.  Confining her remarks to the method.of dealing with the child under six or seven years, Dr Isaacs said that difficulties encountered in children in the form of temper were quite natural. In America, two groups of children had been studied from birth up to six years of age. One group had been referred to a child clinic, and the other not, but in both instances the same tempers and fits of screaming had been manifested. The displays of temper are caused by the intensity of feeling in the child – his unrestrained love and hatred – and as the child grows the difficulties become less intense.

For Isaacs – and the other delegates – there were luncheons in Sydney, lectures in Adelaide and at least one interview, urging that educationists linking play and emotional development with education and learning, published in the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus.

In South Australia the advent of the Conference coincided with the announcement by the Council of Mental Hygiene to establish an Institute of Medical Psychology and Child Guidance in Adelaide. It was to be located near the Hospitals, the Children’s Court and the Education Department – and would employ psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers. Again, the popularity of Isaacs’s lectures was marked. She spoke to packed auditoriums, her message: ‘the importance of understanding the mentality of children during the first two years of their life. The essential needs of the child, she said, were love and a feeling of security’.

Remarkably as South Australian audiences noted, Isaacs issued a challenge to the theory that a child had no mental life before the age of about two years emphasising both the importance of motherly love for the understanding of the child mentality and the vital part those early two years played in later life. These lectures provide a glimpse into the state of infant research and infant observations in the pre-war years. We learn from reading press commentary, from noting off the cuff remarks and explanations about research into the mental life of infants prior to WW2 and Esther Bick’s development of Infant Observation Seminars at London’s Tavistock Clinic a decade later.  Announcing plans for her attendance at South Australian leg of the conference a the editor of the Adelaide Mail wrote, ‘One of Dr. Susan Isaacs’ strong con victions is that in order thoroughly to understand the child we must observe him under conditions in which adult interference is reduced to a minimum’.

At the Conference proper, Isaacs stressed infant subjectivity: ‘A baby fed in a “stiff institution manner’ with a bottle lost a rich emotional experience which affected its after development’. Research amongst delinquent girls was revealing a common experience of  lack of love and affection during the first two years of life. It was during this period she continued, that the maternal infant relationship was central to the child’s intellectual and emotional development.

The lecture was also summarised by a reporter for the West Australian a week later.

“Too often the mental life of the infant of a year, or even two.years, is left out.of the reckoning and we are only just beginning to realise the importance of the mental development during the first two years of life. Delinquency, mental ill ness and crime which is apparent in after life often had its beginnings in this stage of mental development,” Dr. Susan Isaacs said. The reporter continued:-

Briefly tracing the course of infants’ mental growth and explaining the difficult ties met with when trying to understand their reasoning, Dr. Isaacs stated that a baby learnt by its own spontaneous efforts which took the form of play starting as early as the second month. Baby should, therefore, be given ample opportunities for play. In the same way speech developed from the first playful sounds until the child began to distinguish familiar and oft-repeated sounds, which we called words. The emotional development of the child was the next consideration. During the first two or three months baby’s feelings were complex and were expressed by sounds. During the first two months any strong effects-bright lights, loud noises, etc.caused discomfort. but after this such things attracted attention until by the end of the first year the causes of pleasure outnumbered those of discomfort. Another interesting change, which occurred at about five months, was the cause of crying. Up to this time baby cried chiefly because of physical unhappiness, but after this age social pleasures and displeasures came into the picture and baby would cry, for instance, when mother left him alone, or because he wanted to sit up and could not manage it. A child’s smile was another signpost of its mental process, Dr. Isaacs continued. Up to the age of 20 weeks the average infant would smile at anyone while from that age until about 40 weeks old they would smile only at intimates, after which they seemed to grow more delicately discriminating and smiled at those they considered  deserved the honour.

There was more. The reporter continued: Dr. Isaacs traced the causes of feeding difficulties, which were often bound up with a child’s emotions and fear of its own early biting instincts. Parents should recognise the amount of learning a child had to do, and introduce new foods and new methods of feeding slowly. Dr. Isaacs did not advocate forcing a young child to eat what was dis tasteful to it, the difficulty usually being overcome by presenting it in a different form.

The challenge now is to discover whether and how these ideas were developed within Australian culture.  Perhaps not at all. And indeed it was not until someone from Europe, in the form of the first Training Analyst, Clara Geroe both arrived from Europe and stayed to develop her work that a space was created for the development of these very rich ideas within an Australian context. Isaacs’s visit occurred during a period in Australian history when England and Europe were regarded as Home;  where  scholars and professionals travelled for the education they would bring back to the Antipodes. The role of the visiting scholar is far more problematic: evoking idealization on the one hand and, may be envy on the other.

References:–

The Argus ( Melbourne) 3 September 1937.

Canberra Times: 12 August 1937; 20 August 1937; 25 August 1937.

West Australian: – 11 September 1937; 20 September 1937.

Advertiser ( Adelaide) 26 May 1937; 6 September 1937.

The Mail ( Adelaide) 3 July 1937.

Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1937.