Category Archives: Australian Women Writers Book Reviews

Kate Richards – Madness: A Memoir

06 Friday Sep 2013

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Kate Richards, Madness: A Memoir, Viking, Melbourne, 2013.

Had I read Madness: A Memoir? someone asked me. I had to confess I had not even though I had seen that the author, Kate Richards, had presented at the Bendigo Writers Festival in August this year. It’s good writing, I was told. So at the first opportunity I schlepped off to the local bookshop to buy a copy. The bookseller similarly provided her endorsement. This is good stuff; the author is impressive and so on. I have not been disappointed. I read it at one sitting, more or less, on the train from Bendigo to Melbourne and back one day.

Kate Richards is a trained doctor. She suffers from what is generally referred to as a Mental Illness. Without medication the illness can take over her entire life and mind. She will live in a state of severe mental distress, believing the world created by her delusions to be real. At these times she is unable to summon enough mental strength to meet the personages inhabiting her mind and directing her thoughts. One of these two personages are benevolent. Kate calls them Henry and Rose. The others are cruel. Kate names them and explains:

“The Cold Ones are severe. Unrelenting. Psychopathic in their gleeful execution of pain. They are clever. The sneer, undermine, are disdainful. They prefer to whisper – criticisms and threats. They are featureless, blankfaced. They do not blink or flinch. They like shadow.

The Savage Ones are fire and brute force. They roar in the imperative.

you bitch. do this this

The Cold Ones nod

she’s scared now.

They titter and whisper and slither in the shadows.

KILL HER

The Savage Ones like rape. They’re not averse to fights, assault, blood, death. They find it funny. They make me dream it. They like to hear things crack and wrench. Red eyes, Red skin. Heat. Sweat.

Then there are the Cruel Ones – fond of knives and teeth.

touch us you die.

They’re always moving, they don’t sleep. The Cruel Ones and the Savage Ones gang up. Hilarious to bind hands and eyes, to dart about, to whisper, to kick where there is tenderness, to snicker where there is pain. To shout obscenities, entice nightmares, scream (shrilly); lose all sense of light and dark.

you are rotting bitch rotting we are gutting you like a fish

They are gleeful.

don’t move don’t breathe don’t fucking breathe suffocate there is force in circumstance BITCH stab yourself you’re a fucking animal we’re watching you bleed where’s the red we’re gonna kill you I singsong, lilting) do you deserve this

Yes”.                                               (Madness: a Memoir, pages 27-28)

Medication and ECT help muffle them – well enough for Kate to be able to hold a job as a medical writer, but not enough for her to be able to live in the world as a normal young woman with friends, a social life and a future before her. At the beginning of Kate’s memoir she sustains herself on a diet of coffee, alcohol, chocolate – and books. But is is a matter of finding the right medication – the combination that works for her – as well as the therapist that will guide her through. As she progresses she manages to find help and eventually come to terms with her illness. She slowly accepts  she will be taking medication for the rest of her life. Her diet improves. She learns a language – Hebrew – and travels overseas alone – to New York and to the Middle East.

It soon becomes clear that the ‘Helping System’ – psychiatrists and doctors is inconsistent and difficult to deal with. A psychiatrist overprescribes, another ‘sacks’ her for non compliance with treatment – without comprehending Kate’s difficulty recognising, let alone accepting her condition is part of the whole story. Stunningly, when Kate, in the midst of her illness burns herself with acid,and seeks surgical intervention, she is refused treatment by a Registrar, no less, because he considers it a waste of resources because her wounds are ‘self inflicted.’ As if he, or was it she? had the authority to make this decision. As Kate noted in her subsequent formal complaint her burns were a result of her serious mental illness.

There are good people. There are Kate’s friends, several good nurses and her GP, Jenny. Then there is Winsome Thomas, the psychologist and therapist who treated Kate on a weekly basis for some years. In scenes reminiscent of the encounters between the patient, Deborah and Frieda Fromm Reichmann in Hannah Green’s account of mental illness and its treatment in  ‘I Never Promised You a Rose Garden’ Winsome Thomas’s clarity and ability to stay with Kate at the worst moments of her illness, to reach and meet Kate’s demons and walk beside her helps Kate gradually  to accept her illness and its place in her life. It is about integrating an unpalatable fact, of realizing that this acceptance ultimately diminishes its power.

In these days where the evidence base counts for much – including the way the mental health dollar is spent – Kate Richard’s memoir shows the sheer humanness  that severe mental distress evokes in the patient as well as her treaters – the psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and nurses.  It affects families and workplaces; treating professionals and the institutions in which patients and treaters reside. Kate’s is not just a plea for understanding but also for the recognition of the complexity of mental illness  that increased expenditure and thought in the mental health field might address. In his memoir the South Australian psychiatrist Andrew Dibden wrote of the relief to people suffering extreme mental distress that came with the development of psychotrophic drugs and ECT from the late 1930s onwards. People were able to get up and walk, to leave institutions that had housed them for many years and to begin to participate in the world beyond its walls. Kate’s memoir shows that there are still many question to be answered.

Also written for the Australian Women Writers Review Challenge 2013.

Janet Butler – Kitty’s War…. Book Review

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1910s, Australian Women Writers Book Reviews

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

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

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

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

Butler writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

‘Ultima Thule’ – Henry Handel Richardson

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Australian Women Writers Book Reviews

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Henry Handel Richardson, Ultima Thule: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony Vol.3, first published 1929. ( Winner: Australian Book of the Year – 1929).

This is the third book in Richardson’s trilogy – ‘The Fortunes of Richard Mahony’ based on the life of Richardson’s father. The first of the three, Australia Felix is set in the Victorian goldfields where Mahony, a doctor, hopes to make his fortune. The second, ‘The Way Home’ concerns his success, and return to the old country. With the third, Mahony returns to Australia having lost his fortune and, with wife, Mary and three children, must find a way to begin again. /Ultima Thule’, meaning ‘the ultimate destination’, concerns Mahony’s failure and his final descent into insanity.

How Henry Handel Richardson (the pen-name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson) shaped this account would be dependent on contemporary notions of mental illness, I thought, when I began reading this book. The late historian Janet Oppenheim has written of Victorian era notions of mental illness – depression in particular – which was often described as weakness and malaise. The asylum, a place apart, was a custodial place. In the early decades of the twentieth century, in Victoria, Australia, medical practitioners  such as Drs John Springthorpe, Reg Ellery and Paul Dane began experimenting with the version of psychoanalysis they had learned of from Freud’s publications. Richardson, who left Australia in her late teens and spent the rest of her life in Europe, was familiar with Freud and enthusiastic about psychoanalysis. It is not surprising that some of its precepts wend their way through her work, even though her trilogy is set in time well before Freud’s emergence.

Mahony is a dreamer, always unsettled, always trying something new. Having lost his fortune he tries to recover and to support his family – wife and three children, by setting up a medical practice in suburban Melbourne, but this fails. He then moves his family and practice to a country town where he and his wife experience the death of one of their twin daughters from dysentery. When Mahony is overheard by a servant, as he talks to the ghost of this child, rumors spread through the community – and he is shunned. Isolated, he falls into depression, and eventually mental illness. He is sorely tempted by suicide – but cannot go through with it and is eventually admitted into an asylum. Richardson follows the process of his thinking…we see, from his perspective, his lack of comprehension as Mahony blunders from one disaster to the next.

Throughout, there are matters of class and relationships – Mahony is not able to relate to the servant classes who mock and deride him. Marriage is under scrutiny… one wonders whether Mary’s practicality was useful to him. What is not is her lack of empathy with him and her insistence on maintaining appearances and implicit rejection of his thinking – and him. She wonders whether he had been better to marry someone else. Perhaps she is right. For Mahony there are also moments of insight: his realisation that he demanded too much of others, that no-one was dearer to himself than himself. Some might call it narcissism in today’s parlance: self love, self aggrandisement and fear… Richardson writes…

Having dragged with him those who were dearer to him than his own life.- But stay! Was that true?….and not just one of those sleek phrases that dripped so smoothly off the tongue. Were they dearer? In this moment of greater clarity he could no longer affirm it. He believed that the instinct of self preservation had, in his case been the primary one. And digging deeper still, he got, he thought, a further insight into his motives. If this were so, then what he fled must needs be the reverse of the security he ran to seek: in other words, annihilation. The plain truth was that the life instinct had been too strong for him. Rather than face death and the death fear, in an attempt to flee the unfleeable he had thrown every other consideration into the winds and ridden tantivy into the unknown. (pp. 120-121, Penguin edition).

Perhaps suicide, and option Mahony considers, was not socially acceptable to write about. Nor would it have completed Mahony’s story as he descends into mental illness. Richardson’s father died from the effects of syphilis… it may be that this forms the basis of the rest of her account of Mahony’s life. I was not convinced the detail she provided on this followed from her outlining  of Mahony’s life-long emotional difficulties. Perhaps the two were intertwined?

Within Mahony’s story there are others. Mary’s response – having to raise the children without the essential support of her husband; her inner conflict around her love for him which was in opposition to the practical realities of daily life provides one counterpoint melody. Another is the voice of the couple’s son, Cuffy – whose thoughts , spoken in the language of children, reveals his wonder and worry about the world of the grown ups about him. For Cuffy is a witness, without comprehension, to it all.

I cannot do justice to the complexity of this volume here which also stands alone in relation to the rest of Richardson’s trilogy. Her exploration of Mahony’s mind and his descent into the hell of unconsciousness warrants reading and rereading for the insight into being human it contains.

What Do Patients Want? Psychoanalytic Perspectives From the Couch

28 Wednesday Mar 2012

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Christine Hill, What Do Patients Want? Psychoanalytic Perspectives From the Couch, London, Karnac, 2010.

I have been engaged on another project now near completion enough to free myself for the Australian Women Writers Book Review Project. My second review, Christine Hill’s What Do Patients Want? also fits the theme of this blog, about psychoanalytic theory and practice within Australian and Western Pacific culture. I have been familiar with this work since its inception over a decade ago. Christine has presented excerpts and research in progress at various workshops and meetings so to see the completed project and to take the opportunity to introduce it through this review. is fitting.

The ‘blank screen’ of the analytic stance, the position taken by the analyst such that the patient projects imagos from their inner world for understanding and analysis, has been a central area of debate and discussion amongst psychoanalytic practitioners during the twentieth century. The patient’s transference, good, bad and indifferent, was the central consideration in the analytic dyad. The analyst’s authority was assumed, the power structure, a given. The inner world of the patient was the object of analysis. And so it developed, more or less, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as Freud worked to establish the principles of the psychoanalytic discipline and to stamp his authority upon it. Those who challenged him, Jung and Adler in particular, were excommunicated. Stekel and Rank highlighted the need for boundaries so that treatment could proceed.  After all, Freud argued psychoanalysis aimed to reach the heart of psychosexuality and to understand disturbances in its  development – without the analyst acting upon it. It is a medical paradigm, modelled on the traditional doctor- patient relationship. The assumption was  that the doctor’s neutrality can be sustained despite the vicissitudes of the treatment relationship. This medical model is under scrutiny – and question – in Christine Hill’s book, What Do Patients Want? Psychoanalytic Perspectives From the Couch.

During the 1950s the ‘blank screen’ principle began to buckle as the notion of countertransference began to emerge as a tool for practitioners. Paula Heimann’s 1950 paper, ‘On Countertransference’ initiated a long and continuing discussion about the affective relationship between patient and analyst, urging that the analyst’s response, her countertransference be utilised towards understanding the patient’s mind. After all, it seemed, the patient was attempting to recreate her world,and  to sustain her life patterns. Perhaps the analyst’s response, her recognition of these projections and ability to discuss these with the patient, was helpful. Nevertheless the essential power structure remained. And as Hill notes, the potential for misuse was real. At worst the doctor/analyst assumed  authority over the patient’s mind; maintaining their knowledge of it greater than the patient’s own. To quote Freud in 1912, ‘When there is a dispute with the patient whether or how he has said some particular thing, the doctor is usually in the right’. (Hill, p.4) This is not to say that the knowledge base and its applications in psychoanalysis have not been useful for patients struggling with difficult childhood memories and patterns. The understandings wrought by a sensitive analyst  who can meet the patient on their own terms, can be incredibly useful. Indeed, insights from work on early infant development, attachment, loss, as well as developing sexuality, can assist meaning making, the building of a self narrative that is reflexive, empathic and sustaining.

Nevertheless it was arguable until recently that even asking the question, What do patients want? or to suggest that people who become analytic patients have an understanding of what it is they may seek, was taboo. How could they know?  It challenged the notion that the analyst knows, or should know, best.

Perhaps the question was threatening?  Certainly in Hill’s home country, Australia, it was. To quote Hill

When I was thinking about this theme and playing around with ideas, I had some discussion with clinicians in the field. On one occasion a senior analyst said to me that what I was doing would not be considered as research – rather it was a ‘social study’. Then, to my surprise I received some vigorous denial that patients could actually know what they wanted, or know better than the analyst if their experience had been successful or not. It seemed he was telling me that patients were not in the position to know whether they had benefitted from their own analysis. ( p.152)

Despite this  Hill was accepted for an International Psychoanalytic Association Research Training Program in 1999, an experience ‘which gave me the confidence to continue’ and to find others who could ‘think about the actuality of [an analysand’s experiences] and did not perceive me as attacking analysis’.( p. 153).

Hill’s project, in part, echoes that of intersubjectivity theorist and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin who has written of the difficulty in all of us in being able to sustain the tension between subject and subject without capitulating to subject and object. Indeed, mentalisation theory and practice – developed by Peter Fonagy and his group at the Anna Freud Centre in London, also suggests a deepening theoretical shift towards intersubjectivity within the psychoanalytic field. Perhaps there are those in Australia who need to read more widely, or who have become far too married to the classical model of psychoanalysis to see that anything else might be beneficial. Case studies written by people who have had an analysis, whose experiences varied from gratitude to anger to disappointment, suggest that patients do have experiences of the other/analyst’s subjectivity. After all, they are people, too.

There was care in the selection of interviewees for this project. Hill recruited 18 people who had completed analytic treatment –  comprising a range of  15 years. Confirmation was sought that the analyst in question was a member of one of three schools practising in Australia: The International Psychoanalytical Association, The Australian New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts and the Lacanian school, the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis. Age range of the eleven women and seven men was from thirty-one to sixty. Thirteen were themselves working as psychotherapists, three in allied health and the other two in the public service. One had commenced a second analysis – and so was excluded from the project. others had received some form of treatment prior to analysis. Perhaps Hill was still responding to her critics when she writes ‘Most of the patients interviewed showed considerable sophistication in their thinking about their analysis and, thus, their stories cannot be lightly dismissed’. (p.13).

Interviews covered matters such as how the analyst was chosen: man or woman, appearance, style of working as well as the total experience. One of the interviewees, ‘Min’ was intent on choosing an analyst whose style was not rigidly classical:

“I had made decisions about how it was going to be for me and was clear that what I was going to negotiate with the analyst… Right from the word go I wanted it to be as much in my territory as it was in the analyst’s. And I wanted to be a patient-partner; I didn’t want to be a patient victim’. 

Others similarly eschewed the rigidly classical style – it did not feel safe; the analyst seemed to be too intellectual or not able to empathize fully with the patient. Other factors included experience, finances ( In Australia the medical fraternity are fully subsidised by the public health system), geographical proximity, the ability to understand and maintain boundaries – and serendipity – choosing at random from the phone book. For several analyst’s physical space was an important factor ..the dirty waiting room; the ‘mansion’ in which one analyst had a consulting room was a subject for comment.  Perhaps some patients, sensitive to the authority of a ‘doctor who knows best’, found interpretations delivered in the pejorative mode to be off putting. Others may have found a particular analyst ‘too soft’. Choice of analyst is a personal, if not idiosyncratic matter, Hill is discovering. Many of those who become analytic patients clearly put much thought into their choice of practitioner. Perhaps it is a reflection of the late twentieth century world that the ‘doctor’ is no longer to be reified, nor the patient subject to ‘whatever is available’.

Hill covers in detail the analytic process encountered by her subjects – engagement, working in the transference, the paternal transference and ending the analysis. For some the experience was good: the capacity of the analyst to hold the patient through times of incredible psychic terror was noticed and important. Others experienced interpretation as an abuse of power: ‘He would make these interpretations to me how I was resisting, I was withholding, I was not willing to give in’, one interviewee noted. ‘I wanted to give. And I felt that every time I opened my mouth that there wasn’t a reflective space for me to develop those ideas’.( p. 63). Hill explores the nuances of the analytic relationship with care and sensitivity – understanding and respectful of the interactions the interviewees are trying to relate. Listen to this, from page 90 of the book.

Kerry explained to her analyst, with feelings of sadness and regret, that she used to have a few broken belongings of her father’s, which were rosary beads and a pipe. In an earlier therapeutic relationship, Kerry had given this little package to her therapist with the words, “I shouldn’t be holding onto my father, I should be getting rid of him. You can take care of these things”. In this current experience, her analyst interpreted that she had given away the father’s belongings, not to be disposed of but for safe keeping. He told her they represented the brokenness of her relationship with her Dad, which she really wanted preserved. In spite of protestation by Kerry that he had it wrong, the analyst reinforced his comment with the words, ” No he’s yours; you’re keeping him alive inside you”. Kerry found his words so liberating, as though he were saying to her, ‘Have yourself, have your Dad, have your own thoughts, have all the madness. Have it, it’s yours. Keep it. Don’t feel like you have to fix it, get rid of it, whatever”. (p.90)

Psychoanalysis is a complex project. It involves, for some, a years, if not decades, long committment and within it experiences of varied complexity and emotional intensity. It holds the possibility for a reworking of old conflicts, a re-learning about living. For others it is a disappointment. Always it is a considerable investment of time and money. It is a serious and long term committment for patients – and for analyst. Work concerns how to understand who is doing what to whom? At bottom, for patients and analysts alike, is the intersubjective encounter that inevitably occurs. The patient’s experience of the analyst as human being should recognised Hill is arguing. Some analysts are rigid in their approach, others not. They are not, by definition, always right.But those who practice psychoanalysis want to provide help as much as people who become patients seek their help.

Through giving ‘patients’ space to tell their stories of their analytic experience, Hill has uncovered the complexities and questions that may well haunt anyone who has been through such an experience – even those who are now practising as psychoanalysts. There are more questions than answers here – about analysts, about patients, and the meaning of the experience in one’s life. The humanity within this book testifies to that.

Manhattan Dreaming – Book Review #1

18 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Australian Women Writers Book Reviews, Reviews

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Anita Heiss, Manhattan Dreaming, Bantam Books, 2010.

In pursuit of books by women writers to read and review for the Australian Women Writers Book Review series for 2012 I picked this at random from the shelves of a second-hand bookshop: ‘Soldier and Scholar’ in Castlemaine, Victoria. The cover is inscribed: ‘From Manuka to Manhattan Lauren’s going all the way’.  Manuka is a familiar place to me. Now a trendy shopping  and café centre, Manuka  is close to the parliamentary triangle and hub of the nation’s capital, Canberra. I remember it as the place where the family did the weekly supermarket shopping when it was one of the two main centres on the south side of Lake Burley Griffin in the 1960s. The book’s cover also tells me that the main character, Lauren, is a Koori woman, a professional art curator who lands her dream job: a fellowship at the  Smithsonian Institute in New York. Manhattan Dreaming, I later learn, won a Deadly Award for the author, Anita Heiss, a woman of the Wiradjuri nation in Central New South Wales . The Deadlys, by the way, are awards given annually to Koori people who have achieved in the arts.

The storyline is straightforward enough. Lauren, in her late twenties, with a Masters Degree under her belt, and a job as Senior Curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, is offered the chance of a lifetime to live and work in New York in her field. Supported by her friends keen that she leave behind her no-good, self obsessed boyfriend, a football player for the ‘Canberra Cockatoos’, no less,  and centre of a sex scandal that has featured in these circles over the last few years, Lauren leaves her place, and her country, to venture into the new world  – New York. Not only does she find that things are different over there, but she also has the opportunity, despite herself, to reconsider her relationship with the football player, and to understand what is valuable in a relationship. In New York, she learns, she can be herself and not, as she states, ‘someone’s exotic’. Gradually the sheaths fall from her eyes and she finds true love.

This is ‘chick lit’ stuff – but with another, serious, agenda. Woven throughout the text are matters of  place, family and identity – an education for some readers about the place contemporary Koori culture within the broader Australian setting. Lauren is ‘a Lucas from Goulburn’, (a regional city near Canberra) she tells her new Koori acquaintances in New York. It places her. Her family has been there for generations. Lauren’s family are her stability, her parents’ home, the centre of her world. It is not idyllic;  the Lucas family clearly has its struggles. Lauren’s older brother is in gaol for some unspecified crime – a common event for many Koori families.  Her younger brother does not seem to be doing very much. Leaving Goulburn and her work in Canberra for adventures overseas means leaving her country. But she will always return home.  It is never forever.

In a poignant scene early in the book Heiss  highlights the intimacy of Lauren’s relationship with ‘place’ as her father struggles with the idea of her moving so far away.

English: Taken by me ona recent trip to Canber...

Image via Wikipedia

THE BIG MERINO _ GOULBURN, NSW.

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‘There’s the Big Mushroom in Canberra, and there’s a Big Cow somewhere and a Giant Kangaroo, but ah, no, you women want to go to some Big Fancy Apple in America’. Dad stood up and took his cup to the sink, running water into it as he spoke. ‘I’m sorry love, but the Big Merino has been good enough for our mob for the longest time – no big piece of fruit is going to make me let a daughter of mind go to New York’.  And there is the lovely joke between Lauren and her brother about ‘shagging’ in the eye cavity of the Big Merino! Heiss knows her places.

‘Place’ in Canberra is not so well handled by Heiss. Here her perception of the city and its workings  seems rather two dimensional. 2010 Manuka might be a centre where young professionals gather, along with scattered eateries and nightclubs. I am not sure how the characters ended up in a suburb in Belconnen so far away from the centre where Lauren spends most of her time.  Canberra has a thriving cultural and social life  hidden beneath the façade of institutions and large public buildings. This is a small quibble in the overall texture of the novel. Moving to New York one may find similar issues regarding place. But there is another intercultural event going on as Lauren works out  a new vernacular and variations in dating and relationship rituals from those she is accustomed to at home.  Of course, she is finding new opportunities and common concerns between indigenous people in Australia and the United States.

Overall though this is a tale well told. With deftness of touch Heiss reveals another side to the bad news about Koori culture frequently featured in the Australian press. So often focus is upon the tragedies in the Northern Territory Communities that have become the centre of what the Government refers to as ‘The Intervention’ means that one misses the vibrant and creative work being undertaken by the Laurens of this world.  Historically, even as missionaries and government officials have talked about the dire straights for Koori people living on the fringes of settler communities, there have also been Koori families who have found their way into that community and have been recognised for their contribution. Heiss’s task, to build bridges between settler and indigenous cultures, is well placed. She more than succeeds here.

More on the Australian Women Writers Review Challenge 2012

15 Sunday Jan 2012

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Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge

A couple of posts ago I said that I was going to participate in this event: the idea being to spread the word about quality work by Australian women, and, for me to undertake some disciplined reading and thinking about reading.

To begin this project I decided to look first at my own bookshelf full of books that I bought with the intention of reading but have not got around to doing so, have inherited from my family’s bookcases, have been given as a gift, or borrowed.  A couple of books I found in my local second hand bookshop. In the spirit of Wallaby I thought I would list my rather eclectic choice and my reasons for deciding to pursue these. Some of those ‘Wallaby’ chose – Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony are on my shelf, too but are in the ‘already read’ category. My father handed the Richard Mahony book to me with the words, ‘Mahony is rather like your grandfather’ – meaning he was a dreamer…Too! But I learned that the apparently male writer was a woman – and a good one too.

Anyway the books I have chosen, not necessarily in any order of reading are:

Anita Heiss: Manhattan Dreaming; Bantam, 2010. Genre: Women’s Fiction/ Chick Lit. I picked this at random from the local second hand bookshop yesterday because it has a red cover ( visible) and the author is a woman. I have since discovered that Anita Heiss is a woman of the Wiradjuri Nation in New South Wales. This will be interesting.

Christine A S Hill, What Do Patients Want? Karnac, 2010 Genre: Non Fiction. I have chosen this partly because I work professionally in the in field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Hill set out to interview people who had an experience of psychoanalysis as patients in order to understand what it was like for them. I bought the book shortly after it was published.

Anne Curthoys and Ann McGrath: How to write history that people want to read. UNSW Press. 2009. Genre: Non Fiction. Why? Because it was on my bookshelf. Curthoys and McGrath are historians, specialising in Indigenous Settler relations, at the Australian National University.

Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Genre: Non Fiction. Clendinnen is one of the finest historians in Australia today.

Amy Witting: Beauty is the Straw, Angus and Robertson,1991. Genre: Poetry….

Lily Brett: Too Many Men, Picador 1999, Genre: Literary and Classics This book was another on the bookcase that needed reading.

Eleanor Dark: No Barrier, Genre: Literary and Classic. Dark’s work has haunted the family book case for years. I have not yet read this one.

Justine Ettler: The River Ophelia, Picador, 1995 Genre: Literary and Fiction/ Women’s Fiction/ Gen X Fiction… Another picked at random from the second hand bookshop.

Diane Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, And Will Be, 1999. I discovered this book  during my thesis writing years when I was exploring the history of the Ngarrindjeri people around Mannum and Murray Bridge in South Australia. Now to return and read it properly.

It’s going to be an interesting year!

National Year of Reading 2012

12 Thursday Jan 2012

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I have decided to sign up for the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge after reading about it on the blog : The Resident Judge of Port Phillip.  I am a little worried though… I have a tendency to take on rather too much and can end up procrastinating. But I would like to return to habits of reading deeply and carefully, part of my undergraduate years. Time, career, writing a thesis, family responsibilities have meant that increasingly reading for pleasure was set aside, along with discovering new writers – and those of decades past. I can still recall reading Eve Langley’s 1942 book,  ‘The Pea Pickers‘  and being fascinated by the journey of two sisters who went to work as labourers in Gippsland, when I was in my early twenties.

The Challenge Convenors have set an objective, viz:

This challenge hopes to help counteract the gender bias in reviewing and social media newsfeeds that has continued throughout 2011. It actively promotes the reading and reviewing of a wide range of contemporary Australian women’s writing throughout 2012, the National Year of Reading.

I will  aim to read ten books of either fiction or non-fiction and review four of them. There are a few books published in the last couple of years that interest me – including Anna Funder’s All That I Am.  In the non-fiction field is the thesis turned into book by  Psychologist Christine Hill. What Do Patients Want?, the result of her interviews with people who have sought psychoanalytic treatment.  That makes two.

So… a project for rainy days…!!