Category Archives: 1940s

A diary of an analysis 1: Meeting ‘Dr W’.

01 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in 1940s, Case study, what happens in psychoanalysis

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The patient, a woman aged 25 when the analysis begins, is a Londoner. I shall call her ‘Matilda’. Her diary begins in May 1944 and continues until the end of the war.

I met Matilda for the first time when she was in her eighties during one of her visits to Australia. Perhaps her awareness that I work as a psychotherapist prompted her to speak about her own experiences in analysis. He was a Jungian, she said. She recollected seeing him in the early 1940s, several years after her arrival as a refugee from Nazi Europe.

This is her first session. I will use italics for her actual written words.

London: Wednesday 10 5 1944

No couch – relieved. Comfortable chair. Fatherly, not very interesting man, looks more business than doctor.

‘Dr W’  asks for her name, age and about her parents whether they are living or dead. She has a brother and sister? and her work? Does she like it? and does she have a boyfriend? He asks her about her school and leaving Germany.

To her surprise he asks about my scar; thinks this is an important incident ( I had not mentioned it all, never thought of it). Asks whether boyfriend is ‘first and only’…what interests? Is graphology a deep interest?

Conclusion: No firmness, psychologically non-existent, swimming about. Thus no firm relationship is possible. Must become… ?  and develop firm feelings. It will take a little time.

I say I have no patience.

You must learn it, he says. It is like the growth of a plant. It cannot be rushed. One can work if one knows what for.

Dr W advises her not to talk to anybody about her analysis. He warns her that it disturbs the progress if a third person takes part. It is to be between the two of them. Matilda continues her reflection.

On the conscious level I seem all right. [The] problem lies somewhere else.  I have to find and keep… [the] secret of myself.

Matilda attends a week later. She full of dreams, ideas and associations. I do not know whether she has read Freud’s work? But here she is curious… it is as if she has begun the work.

Dreams  – underlying factors – She feels there is no basis, the diary records. She is running about in a terrrific inner muddle. Floating from one thing and one person to another.  She has put her bag on a chair – in a dream or in the consulting room? It indicates that I want to occupy a place somebody else has.

Dr W asks Matilda about her mother. She was distant and aloof when I was small and needed her. It made me suspicious of love and unable to accept it. He explains that there is the parallel with a  dog  who after being shut in a dark room, starved and beaten is coaxed by the same and other persons. He will be perplexed and run away. 

How frightened Matilda must have been when she was a little girl. She continues,

I mention the element of cheating that goes through my dreams. Dr W replies.. if I do not know who and what I am I cannot face [matters] and am bound to cheat.

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

Who, I wonder, is Dr W?  Matilda described him as a Jungian. If this is so, then  Dr Ambrose Cyril Wilson is a possibility. I find an obituary for him written by D W Winnicott in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol 29, 1958, page 617. I have made inquiries and excluded Winnicott himself.

Wilson  was the son of Ambrose Wilson, headmaster of Melbourne Boys Grammar School in the 1890s. The family had travelled from London, to Cape Town then Australia before returning permanently to London where Cyril matriculated and decided to study medicine.

Cyril Wilson qualified in medicine at Barts in 1908. He served in the Army during WW1 and then had a stint as an actor. He was an early member of the British Society of Psychoanalysis from 1924.   He began analysis with a Jungian, Robert Young.  After two years he had transferred to Ernest Jones and thence to membership of the British Society after qualifying. After a period of financial strain during which he looked into analysis with James Glover, Winnicott continues,  Wilson was in  analysis with Melanie Klein for seven years. He was on the staff at the Society’s clinic, the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis until 1945.

The dates add up and the little bit of information Matilda provided about her analyst’s identity points to Wilson. As a refugee Matilda would have had some financial constraints upon her… it is not impossible that the London Clinic was her preferred option when she decided to seek analytic help.

Winnicott seems to have respected Wilson’s ability. He wrote of him:

Although Wilson never contributed significantly to psychoanalytic theory he did a good deal of original work on the paternal aspects of the superego. This he never assembled in written form nor could he be persuaded to write up his findings after his appointment by the Home Office to study homicide cases at the Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.

Wilson had a fighting sense of rectitude, Winnicott continues. He gave himself almost solely to his patients, and was militantly independent and in the Society eschewed politics.  He was particularly interested in the treatment of offenders and was an early member of the Institute for  Study and Treatment of Delinquency and in the final stages of his career a consultant to the Portman Clinic in London.

I am intending to follow Matilda’s progress session by session, placing it alongside  historical material that could help contextualise her experience. It is a glimpse into the world of British psychoanalysis in the last years of the war … It will be interesting to see what happens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miss L’s Dream Diary – Seeking ‘Dr W’.

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in 1940s, Diaries and Source material, Refugees, WW2

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Once in a while in the business of researching and writing history a rare document emerges from the archive boxes. Such items are the products of serendipity; the result of a decision made by their author, or someone, that it should be preserved. Writing in the 1940s, the French Historian and then member of the Resistance, Marc Bloch, drew my attention to such moments. The archives we rely upon for historical understanding are built from such off-the-cuff decisions and accidents – and from the systematic collation of records that are part of bureaucratic life. To read the thoughts and ideas of people who were alive in times past is  to read of our formation. These thoughts and dreams, however recorded, are the beginning of understanding. Poetry, novels, theatre and art are their interpretation. So, too, is the writing of history.

Recently I was given a box of documents collated and packed by an elderly woman, whom I shall call ‘Miss L’. She has since gone into full-time care, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. It is clear Miss L thought carefully about what was to be kept and what was thrown away. Along with the usual documents: degrees, certificates, bank records, letters and photographs there are two diaries – both kept during the 1940s when she was consulting a psychoanalyst in London. One of them follows the course of her consultations with the analyst, referred to as ‘Dr W’. The other is a dream diary, a record of nightly dreams kept during this period. Most of these dreams hold  images of her daily life and interactions with members of her family and lovers. Others are threaded with images of death and violence at the hands of the Nazis in the years before the war broke out. In others, still, she is addressing ‘Him’, her analyst, on one occasion admonishing him for not listening. Sometimes she makes a joke of him, wondering whether psychoanalysis is of value – at least to the patient. Miss L has a story to tell and conflicts to unravel. She wants and needs him to listen.

Miss L is a German Jew. During her childhood she lived near Nuremberg, the youngest of a wealthy family. Her father, a merchant, had fought in the Great War and was awarded the Iron Cross for his services. Like many of his Jewish contemporaries who were similarly awarded, he believed this would protect him from the worst excesses of the Nazis as they came to power in the 1930s. Five days after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Miss L’s father took his own life. She and her mother escaped Germany early in 1939, eventually arriving in England after travelling through Switzerland.

Miss L’s dream diary reflects her larger internal process of emigration and resettlement, from danger to safety. She speaks to her analyst of leaving one country behind but, after several years, still not settled in another. Her dreams are of murder and death. It is not unlikely she was witness to such events, if she did not hear about them from others. She also dreams of losing her identity documents on a train a reference, perhaps, to a period where she was stateless.

After her arrival in London she  experienced rejection by members of the English Jewish community because of her German origins. ‘I was not served in a shop, she tells her analyst.  In later life she recalled how much more devastated she was by this rejection by the English Jews than she had been in Germany during the years when Jews were increasingly deprived of their rights, property and wealth. Miss L eventually anglicised her name and worked hard to become British – even more so than the British. She appears to have been very much helped by Dr W. For it was after her work with him that she went to university to study for a career that would help restore the family fortune lost to the war. Miss L did not necessarily aspire to Law but eventually made a significant contribution to it.

During her analysis with Dr W, Miss L recorded her dreams on a daily basis throughout 1944 into 1945. I will transcribe two: the first because it tells us just how much she had to bear. These were the experiences and memories from which she tried to protect her children. Earlier in the analysis she had dreamed of being told not to speak. But in her conscious selection of this document for the archive box, she has I believe, expressed the wish that these experiences be known. When I read this dream, I wept.

When I read the second dream for the first time I had the feeling I had read it somewhere before. Perhaps in a case study somewhere deep in the psychoanalytic literature…? I record it now because if I am right, this may identify Dr W. Perhaps someone else has read it, remembers it and may know where it has been published. Or perhaps I have imagined reading it.  Suffice to say it is Miss L’s dream.

Dream 1. Tues 2 May 1945.

[Two girls] have offended against some rule of their school and I am told they will both be executed for it. I think it is monstrous. I want to tell everybody about this and do something against it, but I  hear the headmistress did not waste a minute, and they are already dead. I meet a man who worked in my father’s office and he is coming from the execution. I go up to him and start crying but try not to. I say to him ‘I am sorry. I did not mean to cry, but this is just too much’.  I go out to see [a lady], she must be in despair [I think]. The girls were the only thing she had in life. I find her together with some other women each of whom has lost a son. She is quite calm. They all talk about their children.

Dream 2. Sunday 20 May 1945

Mother says we are going to buy some black material for a dress for me at a certain shop in Nuremberg. I am rather thrilled. I haven’t bought any material for years. I leave the house and walk along a street in Nuremberg. There is a beautiful warm shine of light from [ a building she names but is indecipherable]. Before it was bombed the light never shone right through. It is lovelier than ever.

Round the church and the street there are rows of dead bodies of American soldiers. Some are wrapped up in brown paper and string, they must be really dead. One who was lying against a house opposite the church gets up and shows me the way to the shops and I talk to him. I remember that I never told mother I was going out but when I get near the shop I meet her and my aunt with a man in a dark uniform. He has very dark deep set eyes and a rather taut face. He seems much more interesting to me than my guide , who is rather fat and jovial.

The War had ended on 8 May 1945.

References:

Marc Bloch,( c.1944).  The Historians Craft, Oxford, 1971.

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

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.

A Letter Home – Ruth Thomas

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in 1940s, Anna Freud Centre, Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, Child Study, Government policy, History of Child Guidance, Lay analysis, Ruth Thomas

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Ruth Thomas was born in Sydney in 1902. She a graduate of Sydney’s Fort Street School and continued onwards to Sydney University to study psychology and, in 1923, the founding year of the Australian Society of Psychology and Philosophy, runner up in an essay competition adjudicated by Professor Francis Anderson. The winning essay, ‘The Relation of Repression to Mental Development’ by a Mr Cunningham from the University of Melbourne was published in the Association’s journal. Sadly, Ruth Thomas’s essay, nor the title were published.  On 3 February 1924 the Social and Gossip Column in Perth’s Sunday Mail announced her impending arrival as a lecturer at Claremont Teacher’s College – also under the directorship of Robert Cameron.By 1933 Perth had claimed her as its own. She was moving further afield, the newspapers announced,  she moved to London to take up the post of Principle Lecturer in Education at St Gabriel’s College in Camberwell. ‘Rarely are Australian’s so well treated’ wrote the editor of the Daily News in October 1933. Ruth Thomas had written to her friends who passed her letter to the paper. It was published in full. it is a digression, but reveals some of the liveliness of this woman who seems to be soaking the old world and its beauty into her being..

‘I have just spent a week-end at Cambridge, which is lovely. We went over Trinity and King’s on a wet Sunday afternoon. One or two punts were out on the river in spite of the weather, and the light falling through the woods along the parklands where most of the colleges ‘back’ in (so, Cambridge ‘Backs’ they are called) was almost green as it fell through the bright colors of the new trees. I’ve seen nothing like it before. You’d laugh at it on canvas as unreal. It was fun to see the solemn young undergraduates in grey flannels and brown Norfolk jackets pacing about with the inevitable pipe. I guess they’re luckier than they know.

All was of consuming interest, even where she lived..

‘I have ‘digs’ of my own over-looking a lovely square just off the river and ten minutes from everywhere. I climb solemnly up four flights of very dirty stairs, with the odor of last century’s cooked eggs, and purple wallpaper. At the top I’ve managed to set up some thing like a decent ‘diggings.’ My room is 16ft. by 13 ft., newly done out in cream, and with a built-in wardrobe. Hence it was easy to make it look like it a study. I have a nice Davis carpet, very oriental, in orange and fawn, and ‘ a low divan you’d never recognise as a bed, bookcase and a desk, and other I whatnots, scoured from the Jewish shops in Fulham Road. The scouring required when I got them was another matter.

Perhaps London life at last sated Ruth’s hunger for the arts and culture, and a bit of ‘star spotting’.

‘The other night I went to all night place where artists congregate, for beer and food, and had a table near [the writer] Beverley Nichols. He is what you’d imagine — long and fair and thin — in immaculate evening dress, and with the air of the very modern young man. ‘Alfred Noyes [the poet] is quite different. I went recently to hear him on religion and poetry in a lunch-hour lecture af St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. He has a lovely voice and recites poetry like an angel, but he has also an illogical mind. His matter was horrible. It interested me to hear him say Shakespeare’s greatest line was ‘Ab- sent thee from felicity awhile.’ I shouldn’t have thought it. He is fat and very forty-ish, with a few hairs pulled across a quite bald head, wears large glasses and double-breasted suits. It seems a pity, for the’ author of [the play] ‘Sherwood.’–

For ‘native-born’ Ruth, London was a place of firsts, of seeing sights and artwork hitherto read about in books; the subject of daydreams. There was an exhibition of artwork, murals by Frank Brangwyn commissioned by The House of Lords as a memorial to the Great War ‘Quite the acme of my artistic life here have been the Brangwyn Panels’, Ruth continued.   They were, originally painted for the walls of one of the galleries in the House of Lords as a war memorial, and range from ten to twenty feet in height. The Lords could not see that they were a war memorial, and turned them down after the artist, Brangwyn put nearly ten years’ work in them’. Only five of the eighteen proposed were completed.  The Brangwyn Murals have been uncovered by devotees of lost art….I have found three – also published via the web.

Here are three of the murals Ruth saw at the exhibition.

Ruth Thomas continued: “He strikes the note of actual warfare only, in relation to all living. The riot of life, struggle for power, parasitism and greed, sex, mother love, and pleasure are all portrayed in a most exotic symbolism and the brightest and most exhilarating of greens, blues and oranges. He contemplated, too, a modern panel, with industrialism and luxury in contrast, but there is only a rough sketch of it. It is now thought they will be bought by America and the Lords wont wake up until 2050”.

In September 1937 Ruth Thomas returned to Australia to attend the New Education Fellowship Conference then being held across Australia – after an initial stint in New Zealand. Susan Isaacs, a follower of Melanie Klein, was a keynote speaker. By this time Ruth was on the staff of the London Child Guidance Clinic.

When war broke out in 1939 Ruth Thomas was amongst those recruited by Dame Evelyn Fox to advise on the needs of evacuated children. Others included the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. As had Winnicott, Ruth Thomas addressed ‘ordinary mothers’ on the needs of children via the BBC. By 1943 she was in charge of a children’s home in Pusey in Wiltshire. She wrote a memo which was included in the  1946 ‘Curtis Report’ – “Children Without Homes”. Its recommendations instrumental in the development of substitute care in the United Kingdom – and a decade later in Australia, in the Victorian State Government’s 1954 Children’s Welfare Act.  after the war. These all brought her into contact with Anna Freud who was also working with displaced children, including a group from European Concentration camps.  There were practical considerations alongside the psychological. Money and goods were scarce. Ruth sought contributions from the folk at home. One such was published in 1947.

Miss Thomas desires clothing that may no longer be needed -knitted woollies, jumpers and cardigans, little boys’ trousers, socks, underwear and old cloth ing that could be cut down. Parcels may be sent to “Miss Ruth Thomas, I Cornwall Gar dens, London S.W. 7.” They must not exceed 11pounds ( weight) or £5 in value, must not contain over 21b. of knitting wool, must be clearly marked “Gift” and a statement must be attached giving details and value. The sending of piece goods in parcels to England is prohibited.

When Anna Freud began a training program at her clinic in 1947, Ruth Thomas was appointed as a training analyst and as a lecturer. In an appreciation published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy  after her death in 1983 it was noted that ‘her seminars on ego and ego development were models of clarity’. She was much sought as a supervisor; was tough, kindly with high expectations of her students….

There is always going to be migration to and fro, knowledge transmission leaving and coming to Australian shores. Perhaps it is a manifestation of transnationalism, and, as Australian historians begin to explore the possibilities within this concept, it implies a movement away from a defensively assertive independence as the influence of the mother-country is to be shaken away to recognition that we are part of something rather more global….

References:

Kenneth Brill and Ruth Thomas, Children In Homes, London, Victor Gollancz, 1970.

E. E. Model, Ruth Thomas 1902–1983: An appreciation,Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1983.

The Daily News, 30 June 1933, p.8.

The West Australian, 29 October 1933.

The West Australian, 24  September 1937.

The West Australian, 20 February 1948, p.15.

Related articles

“Foundations of Behaviour” – McRae’s lecture series – Perth, Western Australia, 1943.

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by in 1940s, Bill McRae, historical source material, Lay analysis, public education, western australia

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William McRae, The Foundations of Behaviour, Melbourne, OUP, 1945.

Writing of Western Australian Bill McRae in her history of psychoanalysis in Australia, Freud in the Antipodes, Joy Damousi asserts  McRae believed psychoanalysis was  reserved for those with deep-seated difficulties. His aim, she writes, was ‘to break down resistance which prevents us knowing ourselves’ and that he thought it was dreams that enabled such resistances to be accessed. Drawing on two books published by McRae during the 1940s –About Ourselves and Others (1941) and Adventures in Self Understanding (1945) Damousi also notes McRae’s ‘reformulation of the Oedipus Complex’ upheld particularly oppressive stereotypes about men and women, about male and female. (Damousi, 2005: 175-6). As offensive as these were, such stereotypes reflected his  time, Damousi explains. It was war-time. Gender roles were being reshaped, families were having to adapt to long absences of their menfolk; lives and careers were on hold. Women were involved in activities traditionally the domain of males. ‘McRae listened and interpreted the testimonies of those who spoke to him through this prism’. Damousi writes. It shows that psychoanalysis was moving from being used ‘to analyse individuals’ to define the place of these individuals within the community and society. ( p.178).

It is an interesting thought. Editorially this statement and Damousi’s reference to McRae’s work has been at a point where she wants to introduce what she considers to be a larger and more important issue:   advent of psychoanalytic institutes in Australia also during the 1940s.

My own impression of McRae is somewhat different – even as I find his version of psychoanalysis ‘thin’ and his writing repetitive. McRae’s stance on the relations between men and women were but one corner of his work. He also wrote of infants, children and dreams. Often, by his own admission, he framed his views from psychoanalytic texts he was reading at the time.  I have mentioned McRae’s lecture series given to the Adult Education Board of the University of Western Australia: ‘The Foundations of Behaviour’ in an earlier post. His intention was to present psychoanalysis in a form ‘that would be of immediate use’ to people approaching the subject for the first time. He hoped that by showing ‘how and why a child’s earliest years determine his basic attitudes to himself and others, and to existence in general’, and then how these basic attitudes persist through life’. We may read McRae’s take on psychoanalysis in relation to societal and family expectations of men, women and children. But I suspect that his purpose was not so much to define or to reshape but to underline the existence and importance of unconscious processes within the individual. He had a battle before him. McRae was aware there were those who remained sceptica.l Behind everything I say, McRae said, there was

evidence in plenty and the backing of some of the greatest minds of our time, but as you read through the book you can safely forget all this and test everything said in the light of your own experience of yourself and others. I ask for nothing more than this.
McRae’s 10 session lecture series demonstrates that he had a grasp of the complexities of psychoanalytic theory of which dreams are a part. His focus on the ‘inferiority complex’ though reveals his Adlerian preference.  He began Foundations of Behaviour with a general introduction – ‘How We See Ourselves’. We may be able to gauge the personality of others, he began, but how do we understand what causes people to act as they do? He drew attention to possible meaning in psychosomatic symptoms; to the mystery behind a sudden onset of acute anxiety or depression, and ways to understand the ‘vicarious satisfactions’ wrought through ‘stealing, delinquency, procrastination or antisocial behaviour for which we are ashamed, sicknesses behind which we hide, then we may not feel too happy about getting knowledge concerning our real motives, for then we may have to change our way of life and this is not easy or pleasant, especially when we have behaved one way for so long’.

This is a basic enough understanding in the twenty-first century but was not so in 1943. McRae’s  motive was to educate. He believed that the opportunity for people to to think about and practice this psychological knowledge might ‘help to materially reduce the amount of psychological ill-health in the general community’. He was critical of those who thought psychoanalytical knowledge should be kept from the public, not just because it concerned the darker side of one’s self, but because they doubted the possibility of presenting such knowledge in an intelligible to untrained listeners and readers.  Instead, he argued ‘we are striving to keep something out of sight’.

Reading McRae’s material is also to become aware of the multiplicity of psychoanalytic material circulating about the place. McRae seems to have been unaware of the work of Melanie Klein, DW Winnicott and others – and the battle over psychoanalysis then going on in war-time Britain. To outline ideas about the potential for psychoanalysis to address underlying matters within the psyche McRae drew on the psychoanalyst, and one-time member of Freud’s circle, William Stekel, whose book, The Beloved Ego, published in 1921,told the story of a king who ‘saw so much hypocrisy and evil that he mourned for the state of the world’. He asked the wise men of the land for advice. Evil may be in the hearts of men and women, they replied, but they are also loyal to you, McRae summarized. They have conquered the evil in themselves.  ‘Do you want to change man’s nature and tear the heart out of his breast. That you cannot bear the sight of Truth proves how wise was the kind Fate in inflicting short sightedness upon you and giving you spectacles’. Stekel, McRae continued, encouraged people to take off their spectacles so as to see the truth for what it is, ‘to own up to weaknesses and to welcome the overcoming of these as a victory and triumph’. Much material included in the lecture series, McRae warned his audince, ‘will be in direct opposition to cherished ideas – ideas which we have clung to with all the tenacity of one who is afraid to let go’.

McRae’s second lecture introduced  Freud’s theories of Ego, Id and Superego; to the slips and mistakes of everyday life. The process of becoming civilised was his theme. His third lecture. ‘The Importance of Birth’  underlined the subjectivity of infant experience. Psychiatrist Eleanor Joyce Partridge’s 1937 Baby’s Point of View, certainly had challenged old-school doctrines against capitulating to the needs of the baby. She found an ally in McRae and another of Freud’s circle, Georg Groddeck whose 1923 ‘The Book of The It’ challenged readers to get inside the mind of a child. McRae, fascinated, quoted from page 89.

Have you ever tried to get inside the thoughts of an unborn child? Try it once. Make yourself very, very tiny and creep into the womb from which you issued. This is not at all such a crazy challenge as you may think and the smile with which you dismiss my suggestion is childishly kind, a proof that the thought is familiar to you. As a matter of fact, without our being aware of it, our whole life is guided by this desire to get back to the mother. ” I should like to get back into you” – how often one hears it said.

McRae goes on to explain the effect of birth upon the baby…’perhaps this is the reason why nature requires so many years of dependence on the mother before the child loses the original pain of separation from the mother, physically’. When it all goes wrong, he continues, a person remains stuck, struggling to reconcile infant needs with the adult world. It is as good a summary as I can find – all the more significant when it is remembered that these ideas were new to people – even if, ‘somehow’, known. McRae takes the matter further:

Everyone of us still bears the effects of birth and these become very much a part of our deepest personality and although the physical part of the birth process is not remembered it has become part of our phantasy life (he uses the word ‘Phantasy’ as this refers to unconscious processes rather than ‘fantasy’ – the stuff of dreams and castles in the air) and as such it is remembered in symbols depicting birth – the most common are fear of snakes, mice and spiders, together with the phobias concerning enclosed spaces.

Freud wrote on Birth anxiety, McRae continued. Otto Rank focussed his entire theory on the birth process while Groddeck also wrote about the days after birth…

Have you ever pondered over the experiences of a baby who is fed by a wet nurse? The matter is somewhat complicated, at least if the child has a loving mother. On the one hand, there is that mother in whose body the baby has lain for nine months, carefree, warm, in undisturbed enjoyment. Should he not love her? And on the other hand, there is that second woman to whose breast he is put every day, whose milk he drinks, whose fresh, warm skin he feels, and whose odor he inhales. Should he not love her? But to which of them shall he hold? The suckling nourished by a nurse is plunged into doubt, and never will he lose that sense of doubt. His capacity for faith is shaken at its foundation, and a choice between two possibilities for him is always more difficult than for other people. And to such a man, whose emotional life has been divided at the start, who is thereby cheated of full emotional experience, what can the phrase Alma Mater mean, but a lie to scoff at? And knowledge will seem to him from the beginning to be useless. Life says to him, “That woman over there who does not nourish thee is thy mother and claims thee as her own; this other gives thee her breast and yet thou art not her child.” He is confronted with a problem which knowledge is unable to solve, from which he must flee, away from whose troublesome questioning he can best take refuge in phantasy. But whoever is familiar with the kingdom of phantasy recognizes, at one time or another, that all science is a kind of phantasy, a specialist type, so to speak, with all the advantages and all the defects of specialization.

Lectures 4 and 5 cover the Oral and Anal stages of development. Lecture 6, ‘The Development of Love or Altruism’ concerns the genital phase, a stage in which children begin to recognise minds of others than their own. It is entwined with the discovery of sexuality, McRae notes. He is following Freudian theory here, linking physical and emotional, sensuality and the development of thinking, elaborated in Lecture 8. The final chapter consists of a series of questions asked of McRae from his audience. These include technical questions – about the meaning of terms such as transference, resistance and repression. Some asked questions that may have been of immediate concern to them – could stuttering be cured? Why does my toddler run away?  There were questions about bottle feeding over breast feeding, about thumb-sucking and whether it was possible to abolish jealousy? Someone asked for a key to bringing up children while another asked when a psychologist could call themself a psychoanalyst. All were answered in terms of the need to understand unconscious processes – that the formations of later difficulties within one’s self and with others lay in the early relationship between mother and infant.

Theoretically it was not sophisticated stuff. McRae was no Freud, Melanie Klein nor Donald Winnicott – or even a member of the clique whose works he quoted. Perhaps he knew his limitations even as he educated others.

References: Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005.

William McRae, The Foundations of Behaviour, Melbourne, OUP, 1945.

Popular Psychoanalysis 1 – Bill McRae, ‘The Psychology of Nervousness’

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1940s, Bill McRae, Lay analysis, lectures, pioneers, psychoanalysis in lay terms, Public debate, public education, the psychoanalytic process

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William A McRae, The Psychology of Nervousness: The Mind In Conflict, OUP, 1942.

In The Psychology of Nervousness McRae sets out to write ‘the story of our inner judge and jury whose task it is to mete out punishment when we fail to live up to our ideals’.   It was part of McRae’s intention to take psychoanalysis out of the doctor’s consulting room, away from a small and elite ‘avant garde‘. Ordinary people he inferred needed to know about the complexities of the mind the unconscious.  McRae wanted to show people that understanding the motives that led to certain behaviours could and would help alleviate emotional suffering. He wanted people to rethink notions of behaviour as an outcome of ‘moral’ lessons beaten into them in childhood. The book addresses the complex matter of destructive anxiety; how envy, rage and jealousy amongst other things may undermine one’s relationship to self and another.   It is one of the first of its kind in Australia, one of McRae’s three plain language introductions to psychoanalytic theory and treatment published between 1941 and 1945.

McRae does not pretend to be a theorist. He is an educator. He drew on the work of Freud and Alfred Adler and used illustrations from his clinical practice in Perth to develop his points. His ‘patients’ were people like his readers, parents, couples, working men and women, adolescents and children. Some were returned soldiers suffering from war trauma.  All behaviour has meaning, he stated. It was a matter of searching for its motives and to accept that much was unconscious. ‘Just as nine-tenths of an iceberg is beneath the surface of the ocean, so an equally large part of our minds functions beneath the level of everyday consciousness’. Behaviour is not an outcome of moral success or failure, he argued but an expression of the instinctive forces within the self mediated by parental figures from infancy. This recognition, helped along by psychological research was ‘gradually teaching men to appreciate how the instinctive forces in the mind, functioning through his feelings, determine his behaviour to a large extent’. It is also a glimpse into notions of  respectability, good behaviour and the emotional effort required to conform to the Australian society at that time.

Although McRae does not cite group theory as such he was firmly of the opinion that the individual is shaped by the group. As the child grows from infancy to adulthood instinctive forces are tamed, primitive forces, civilised..

Today, a person who is afraid dares not try to run away in many instances, simply because he fears more the rebuke of his friends who may call him a coward. Often he cannot give way to his burning resentment, for society may not countenance the form of revenge which he contemplates. Likewise when he craves to express the hunger of the reproductive forces within himself, he must learn control, for the rules of society are more powerful than the instinctive urges of the individual.

Social Darwinist ideas underpin the text: McRae describes how humans banded into clans, groups, communities, society to combat nature and thus enable the development of the civilised mind.

Just as a small child has to learn the art of co-operating with others in the home, so primitive man had to gradually educate himself to work with the group. Just as the child is completely selfish, and instinctively brushes aside the wishes of others, so primitive man, in the childhood of the race, acted in the same way. Through discipline and punishment, the child learns to obey the voice of its parents; primitive man, through the laws of the group, was forced to heed the rule of the majority. The power of thinking, however, came to his rescue.

The ability to think separates [humans] from the jungle past. Even so, he continues,  destructive forces – desires to rape, kill and go to war – may break their bonds in some individuals and social groups. ‘Man will not realise that at heart he is still a cave man’. It is a struggle for all of us.

The first chapter, ‘Guilt Feelings and the Need For Punishment’ takes us into the heart of the matter – and a fundamental precept of psychodynamic therapy.  It is hard to convey the understanding, yet so simple when it is understood, McRae says, ‘that the character of the individual is formed in the first few years of life,and that ever afterwards his behaviour is dictated and directed by this underlying style or pattern’.

McRae is particularly interested in Adler’s theory of the Inferiority Complex. For him it seems, the inferiority complex explains much.It is formed in the early interactions between parent and child – a point reiterated throughout his book. In a typical passage McRae writes

The style or pattern of life, formed in the first five or six years of a child’s life is extremely important, because this style of life is an unconscious one in later years. If a feeling of inferiority has resulted from the training the child has received during these years, that feeling will be embedded in the unconscious in later life, and the child will be heir to all those psychological ills that plague sufferers from Inferiority Complexes. Allied with the feelings of inferiority are usually feelings of fear and guilt, also unconscious – a fear of the world, which the owner has never been allowed to face with a feeling of courage or adequacy, and a feeling of guilt that is, perhaps, the natural enough consequence of a lack of love for strict parents, or the envy of others more fortunate.  

Repressed feelings of fear and guilt…are potent factors in self destruction, he continued. ‘Inferiority Complexes, with their attendant unconscious fears and guilt, are also self destructive’. A chapter on dreams summarises Freud’s theory of the unconscious – about wishes, desires fantasies and symbolization before proceeding to look at unconscious processes in marriage as couple navigate the birth of children, parenthood and the cycle of life.

McRae, however, seems to have all the answers – his version of psychoanalytic theory and dream interpretation is somewhat reductive – along the lines of ‘this means this and that is equal to that. Even if he is trying to get his readers to think afresh about behavior and experience, beyond conscious apprehension.

In analytical work I find that many women feel that the change of life has robbed them of the very essence of womanhood, for few of them are well enough adjusted to realise that their period of usefulness is by no means over when they are no longer able to bear children. Psychologically, this accounts for many of the difficulties which many women experience when the change of life looms ahead of them, for these conflicts set up sorts of nervous reactions. Such women unconsciously resent the passage of time, and often nervous anxieties produce sleeplessness, which may be related to a fear of growing old and dying. This explains what adolescent daughters often find their mothers so trying, for their young charm and freshness intensify the mother’s jealousy, which is unconscious, but finds apparently legitimate reasons to express itself. 

Reception of The Psychology of Nervousness was  lukewarm. It was noted in the press across Australia  particularly in Western Australia. It was  warmly recommended to readers by the editor of the ‘problem page’ in Perth’s Daily News. The editors of the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, far north Queensland was somewhat more direct.  The Psychology of Nervousness was ‘the least convincing’ of McRae’s three books on everyday psychology, they wrote.

The general reader is rightly cautious about disagreeing with experienced opinion in such matters as this book deals with, but he will be hard put to find support from his own knowledge for many of the claims this writer makes. The manifestations of the unconscious mind seem altogether too wayward and remote, and while it may be granted that the unconscious mind, at times, works in anything but a logical way and is a latent influence exerting great effect on an individual’s life, the layman feels that psychologists tend to resort too frequently to the unconscious mind for explanation of certain types of human behaviour. The reason quite often may he a purely physiological one or at least a combination of body chemistry and mind. It may all amount to a question of first cause and that is a great field for argument.

Perhaps McRae’s analysis too reductive  for them.

The general reader falls into this line of thought when he reads that if a child is thrashed for stealing he thenceforward unconsciously looks for and feels the need of punishment whenever he commits theft again. Again: “There have been few “perfect crimes’ because the culprit usually leaves a clue which proves his undoing. He unconsciously desires punishment, so makes a little error in order to be detected.” This seems to endow people with an extraordinarily high ethical sense and to discount the force of self preservation.

Perhaps, the editors suggested, it was better to let things lie even if they were interested in McRae’s chapter on shell-shock and war neurosis and hysterical conversion symptoms.

One valuable advance in psychology has been the demonstration of how internal conflict can affect the organs of the body and produce disease. Mc Rae’s observations on the subject are highly interesting. We can understand that when a conflict is solved the Individual finds life more harmonious and that he gains in physical and mental health but conflicts seem to he part of the price of man’s existence and they must have had considerable influence on the progress of the world. How much do art and science owe to discords of mind?

McRae had faced such objections before. In his final chapter he stands by his position.

I do not require that it should completely satisfy the philosopher and the aesthete. I know that it works, that it heals the sick and comforts the weary, and that, because of this, must be right. If its concepts offend some, the answer that I give them is not an elaborate justification, but a simple indication of someone who has been cured, someone who has been made happier.

He then describes what is involved in an analysis… explaining the notion of the transference, free associations, dreaming and the negative transference – and matters concerning length of treatment, and the costs.

Sadly William McRae does not make the gallery of psychoanalytic pioneers, the subjects of the exhibition, Inner Worlds, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra during 2011.  I wonder though, how many people struggling with their particular daemons and personal pains found something of relevance, and direction in his books? How many people sought treatment as a result?  A year later in 1943 Mcrae’s public lecture series on psychoanalysis for the University of Western Australia drew an enrolment of 297…