Category Archives: Book Reviews

Bedlam at Botany Bay – and the beginning of an ‘insular’ Australia?

06 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by in Book Reviews, British Imperial History, Historical research, History of Mental Illness, Psychiatry

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James Dunk, (2019) Bedlam at Botany Bay, Sydney, Newsouth Publishing.

I have been pondering isolation. Not the personal state of mind as such, but the complaint often made by Australia’s early psychoanalysts about their isolation from the British and European Centres. In the process of forming psychoanalysis in Australia (Salo 2011) the question was about how to meet the necessary standards of practice and thought about psychoanalysis when it is believed these are not known – and it is all too far away to find out, let alone be in touch with the latest developments. Then there is isolation and distance within Australia and New Zealand… how does each separate state develop its practice as a member of the various bodies that constitute psychoanalysis in this country? For psychoanalysis, theory of mind begun by Freud, and in the century since, embodies a far reaching theory of experiencing and developmental formation. For the Australians in particular, psychoanalysis has not had an easy relationship with the medical profession – certainly not in its early decades of the twentieth century when the Australian based medicals spurned it in favour of organic approaches to mental distress. At base, I tentatively suggest, is not just the foundational story of convict settlement and the development of the land of the unwanted, ( Hook 2012), but also the very response of the Transportees and their overseers to the fact of forced rupture from a homeland, possibly never to return. Such a settlement on Mars would evoke phantasies of unassailable space, methinks. Perhaps this was so when Botany Bay was begun? This leads me to the University of Sydney’s James Dunk’s 2019 book, Bedlam at Botany Bay. This is a study not just of madness and insanity, but its causes and the way it expressed and reflected the structures of the Transportee plight, and the developing governance of the colony. Madness is another, hidden, dimension of settler invasion. It reaches for the fact that the year 1788 for the Australian First Nations people AND for the colonial invaders, that the trauma of personal internal rupture was experienced by members of both groups.

Unsurprisingly, some of the early settlers who arrived from 1788, in the prison colony at Port Jackson up the coast from the first landing point, Botany Bay, at what is now Sydney Harbour, Australia, lost their minds. Transported from Britain to an alien land at the far end of the earth, the al called ‘Antipodes’ on the other side of the globe, they were almost as far as one could go before beginning the return journey, Home. Picture their first sightings of a kangaroo, a wombat or a possum. Trees and foliage so different from anything at home, and the seasons back to front. During those first days a thunder storm cracked the skies open, pouring rain, as if God’s wrath found its expression upon these alienated people ‘perched at the edge of the Pacific’. Anyone who has experienced such a Sydney summer thunderstorm knows what that is like. Think how terrifying it would have been.

We have learned that the Eora people who lived around the landing space when the invading settlers arrived were pushed aside. That the initial ‘dancing with strangers’ described by the historian Inga Clendinnen, (2003) soon gave way to suspicion and hostility. The invaders felled trees, killed prey, and decimated the lands the Eora had cared for for centuries. There was violence, and retaliation alongside curiosity and some attempts at reconciliation. But in the end the invaders and First Nations people retreated to their different worlds as the invaders erected houses, made roads, mapping country according to their own traditions.

Historian James Dunk has added another dimension to the Botany Bay story. He draws out attention to peoples’ emotional reactions and how some were driven mad.

‘ If we slow down, however, and listen closely, we find that doubt, anxiety, grief and despair intrude into these familiar stories’,he writes. ‘ Some became irrational and could no longer govern themselves, or be governed by others. They erupted into mania, or lost themselves in memories and delusions. They cried in fury and tore at the walls of their cells, or stared slack eyed into the distance. Some were consumed by the pressures weighing upon them, and killed themselves. Others simply wandered away. These were all signal problems in such a setting, where discipline, security and industry were fundamental to the business of fragile government’ (pp.2-3).

Images of the gibbets hung with so called miscreants, the whipping posts, and, eventually another form of brutality transportation to outlying islands – Norfolk, Pitcairn, or Van Diemans Land, testify to another battle – between the administrators with their official forms and procedures and the convict groups. Among them were those deeply mentally distressed people who, as hope faded, tried to fight – or whose loss of mind was expressed by ‘anti social behaviours’. The punishment was severe for them. They didn’t have the luck to be overtly insane.

’Studying madness’, Dunk writes, ‘shows the fault lines of societies. It is a subject which never loses its relevance because these fault lines still run around us like scars, the outward signs of an endemic disorder which reaches not only down into the belly of who we are but back into the paths we followed to get there’ ( 8).

Dunk’s study of colonial insanity, the development of the Asylum, the use of former convicts as attendants also raises questions about the evolution of psychiatry in this land. Is the stress on organic factors in the aetiology of mental distress, and the sidelining of Freud, and the psychotherapies that we see in the Australian medical men during the 1920s, when Freud’s ideas were gaining currency, somehow an evolution of anxieties about the management of mental distress? So far from home, patient and doctor share an experience of profound loss and personal rupture. At the Australasian Medical Congress of 1924 the prominent Melbourne doctor, John Springthorpe was eager to place Freud’s ideas, so far away in Europe, as losing currency.

An asylum was built early on after settlement, hoping to restrain and contain the more observable effects of transportation: the depression, anxiety and sheer loss of minds the result of families and minds ruptured by the trauma of indefinite separation. Perhaps, for some, an underlying mental illness emerged into the open. Or the plain sheer irrationality of transportation and the experience of being at the mercy of despotic officials, was the cause. The question is about what it was like to be in such a place, and space as colonial settler Australia? But the agency and subjectivity of the Transportees, was rarely incorporated into a lexicon of understanding. Instead there was brutality and abuse by managers who thought little of the beatings they meted out to those they considered far lower, less than human than them. For here, at this classical stage of history, convicts may have been subjects of theories of being, rendering them lower on scales of humanity such as the Great Chain of Being. During the nineteenth century as Social Darwinist theory found its expression in theories of mind articulated by Henry Maudsley, asserting some inherent, inherited biological fault. It limited recognition of Transportee agency and experience, alongside the minds of free settlers. Such ideas have been inscribed into a history building rendering Australia as Antipodean, always peripheral and opposite a British Centre.

‘ In a society built around discipline, magistrates, officers, judges, and governors charged with establishing order saw madness not as an illness, but as a perilous chaos. If they were sometimes moved to deal gently with the insane, at other times they were not, and the shifting structures of law and government ( typical of a penal society) left room for their discretion. There were many who suffered doubly, from the discipline and from the internal damage it wrought in them. Compounded suffering appeared to be the price of the colonial order’ (238).

Dunk’s lens, exploring the experiences of those men, women, and children, sent abroad from their homeland, serves to challenge such phantasies. But also, he suggests that the iron rule of governance set firm boundaries around them, defining them yet again as outsiders whose experiencing was scarcely recognised. Australia, a land girt by sea, has mapped itself into a space with iron borders. The oceans unmapped, as Suvendrini Perera (2009) shows, are unmapped are hindrances to connection rather than a relational space with connections to Asian spaces. Phantasies of Australia’s and isolation and insularity prevail. Australia’s isolation is not much more than an a settler creation, and state of mind.

References

Inga Clendinnen, (2003) Dancing with strangers, Melbourne, Text Publishing.

Maria Therese Hook, (2012) The Tyranny of Distance: the early history of APAS, Psychoanalysis Downunder

Suvendrini Perera (2009), Australia and the insular imagination: beaches, borders, boats and bodies, Palgrave McMillan.

Frances Thomson Salo, (2011), Australia: the evolving relationship with the IPA, in Peter Loewenberg and Nellie L Thompson. 100 years of the IPA: The centenary history of the International Psychoanalytical Association 1910-1920, London, Karnac.

John Springthorpe, in the Proceedings of the Australasian Medical Congress, 1924.

The knitting needle and a new life – Dr Suzanna Taryan, Melbourne, Australia

19 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Book Reviews, Emigres, Hungarian influence in psychotherapy and child psychiatry in Australia, Infant psychiatry in Australia

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When I was a little girl in Budapest, one of my father’s prize possessions ( along with ‘Mari neni’, the skull sitting on our bookshelf) was a globe of the earth with a light in it. I loved that globe. ‘See just here, if you put a knitting needle in it from Hungary, it will come out in New Zealand,’said Dad. He claimed that New Zealand was a land of eternal spring, geysers and naked Maoris, and then he remarked, ‘That is where I would like to go‘ – as far away from the hated Communism of the 1950s, as possible. ( Suzanna Taryan, 2020, p. 11).

There are all sorts of ways to make history. This book by Suzanna Taryan is about the living and the writing of it – from her Hungarian childhood, her escape to New Zealand with her parents, and eventually her role in the early establishment of the professional branch in psychiatry, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and Infant Mental Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne Australia. Her story is part of the larger refugee story – as Settler Australia and New Zealand evolved from Britishness to becoming culturally diverse nations – and all that this might mean.

I had interviewed Suzanna for my Clara Geroe project late in 2019, before the pandemic. Among other matters I am seeking to understand the Hungarian emigre experience – and its influence on the development of the psychoanalytic culture in Australia. Suzanna, just ten years old when the Hungarian Uprising occurred in October 1956, was happy to oblige. And in a sense this book, written for her family, signals the completion of her own personal project, a task triggered by my interest. She has a story to tell.

At the time of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 Suzanna and her parents were living in an apartment next door to the AVO – the secret police building in Budapest. They did not want for an electricity supply… other Budapest households were apparently not so endowed. But when the people marched on the AVO building and dragged the police out onto the streets, and killed them, Suzanna and her family saw too much. Enough to decide to escape. Suzanna’s parents had experienced enough during the war. Her mother’s family perished in Budapest at the hands of the Hungarian fascists when the Russians swept in to liberate Budapest in 1944. Her father had spent time in a forced labour battalion. Of the Russians, Suzanna recounted her father’s words: “The Liberators forgot to leave after the war”. He opposed anything to do with Communism. Even though as he explained to his daughter, knowledge of that opposition had to remain within the walls of the family. Outwardly there would be conformity.

I have come to admire this man, Suzanna’s father. I like his wisdom and chutzpah! He was a survivor. He saved Suzanna’s mother’s life. I hope someone will make a movie about him.

And so the family escaped from Hungary, late in December 1956. They took buses and trains. They walked, with a few possessions and clothes stashed in backpacks, from Budapest all the way to the border between Hungary and Austria. Ten years old Suzanna carried the precious brew intended for bribes along the way. They tramped through deep snow, lost their money to unscrupulous guides, walked around in circles in darkness and eventually were found by Austrian people who provided shelter, food, and rest before the bus trip to Vienna.

Then there was the journey from Vienna to New Zealand where the family settled, and, eventually for Suzanna, Australia -all told through vignettes that mirror the people and culture of the time – their Britishness, smug superiority and their shock at Suzanna’s difference. There is Suzanna going to school without knowledge of English, being put into a class lower than her ability, shooting to the top and eventually making her way to medical school in New Zealand before undertaking psychiatry training in Melbourne. Suzanna tells her story through short descriptions of her encounters with senior professionals, the seminal moments in her life. Her battle to become a child psychiatry trainee – she had to qualify as a psychiatrist first – is told with wry humor as she overcomes one hurdle after another. Dr R, Director of Psychiatry at the Royal Children’s Hospital had put the ‘no vacancy‘ sign up when Suzanna applied for a registrarship there. She ended up at Prince Henry’s Hospital then in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Her cultural difference was one matter to contend with. There was also the assumption of male superiority… has it gone away?

There are personal stories along the way, marriage, family, illness – all the things that constitute a life. Suzanna finally makes it to a consultant psychiatry job at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. She is appointed to the Craniofacial unit alongside Dr L, the Chief Psychologist. Together they became pioneers. They built a body of experience and literature, about early parenthood of children born with facial deformities. It is creative, ground breaking work as the two devise research projects, observational studies of mother infant interactions, write it up and publish articles. Their collaboration is worthy of further study – it was part of the early development of the Infant Mental Health unit at the Children’s. Suzanna also lectured in this field at international conferences – part of the team brokering Australia’s reputation world wide.

I spent a brief period at the Children’s early in my professional career and was aware of this work, albeit from a distance. Dr L was also very influenced by the psychoanalyst Dr Clara Geroe during the 1950s.

This little book by Suzanna is a about courage, luck, and fighting to make opportunities happen despite the odds. It is an excellent contribution to the understanding of the Antipodean refugee story, and the Australian development of international mental health practice for infants. If you wish to obtain a copy of Suzanna’s book please send an email to freudinoceania@gmail.com

Distance Psychoanalysis: A Review

05 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in Book Reviews, Communication Technology and Psychoanalysis

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In 2011 I published a review of Dr Carlino’s book, ‘Distance Psychoanalysis’  on this site. I am interested in the way developments in technology can help people who live a long way from metropolitan areas to have access to treatments they may need. Dr Carlino highlighted issues clinicians should consider. Unfortunately in the first version I described Dr Carlino as ‘Brazilian’. He is not. He was, he wrote to me, born in Argentina. I apologize for this error. I now republish the review with the correct information.

Christine

In his book, Distance Psychoanalysis, published in 2011 Argentinian Psychoanalyst Ricardo Carlino argues for the integration of communication technology into psychoanalytic method. Dr Carlino who qualified as a medical practitioner 54 years ago and as a psychoanalyst 45 years ago now resides in Mexico City where he is a professor of Psychoanalytic Technique at the Institute of Psychoanalytic Education of the Psychoanalytic Society of Mexico (SPM).

By now an entire generation has been brought up in a social milieu where digital technology is the norm.  Baby Boomers who thought they ruled the world are now ‘digital immigrants’. They hold in their minds a history of psychoanalytic practice based on close physical proximity between patient and analyst ( ie in the same room). Yet, like the current generation, they face the challenges and changes wrought by the internet, the world-wide web and electronic communication.  Psychoanalytic practitioners need to explore the way this will impact upon practice and to develop a framework within which they could practice. In the longer term, Carlino argues, communication technology will enable people living in remote regions to get access to this and other treatments.

It’s an interesting – and important – idea and one I will be exploring in more detail as I work my way through Carlino’s book. For the time being, though, I will leave you with this article from today’s online edition of the Australian daily, ‘The Age’, showing just how deeply modern communication technology has altered the world.

Ricardo Carlino, Distance Psychoanalysis: Theory and Practice of Using Communication Technology In The Clinic, London, Karnac Books, 2011.

Review: ‘Ink in her veins: The troubled life of Aileen Palmer’.

21 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in Book Reviews, Poetry, Psychiatry, western australia

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Sylvia Martin, Ink In her Veins: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer, University of Western Australia Press, 2016.

 

It is difficult to not turn away when someone’s life is not working out well. It’s easier to shun. Work colleagues, unable to cope with difficult behaviours, might ease the person from their midst. A family might  banish that brother, sister, son or daughter to a silent place. When respectability is everything  mental distress can shake  to the core.

Sylvia Martin takes us into these shadowy silences in her biography of Aileen Palmer, a translator and talented poet and novelist. Plagued by mental illness  during the second half of her life- or was it, in part, the mental distress of wartime trauma? – Palmer never truly flourished as a writer despite the talent of her youth. Instead  she remained within the protective cowl of her family: her parents, the writers Vance and Nettie Palmer and her sister, Helen Palmer. Regarded on a par with royalty in the Australian literary world from the 1930s the Palmers  moved with socialistic, communistic elite. They held a central place in Melbourne’s literary circles which included Clem Christesen, the founder editor of the journal Meanjin, his wife, Russian born, Nina Maximov Christesen who launched the study of Russion and Slavonic Studies at the University of Melbourne and the historian Brian Fitzpatrick . Nettie Palmer’s biography of the writer, Henry Handel Richardson certainly underlined Richardson’s importance as an Australian author who centred her work  on the colonial experience and the vexed question of identity. The author Katherine Susannah Pritchard was  a presence in Palmer family life – and a mentor to Aileen.   Vance Palmer’s books: The Passage published in 1930 and The Rainbow-Bird and Other Stories, published in 1957 sold more than 50,000 copies each between 1959 and 1974. The Passage found its way onto high school reading lists.  Helen Palmer, an educationalist, sometimes poet and, along with her sister,  a member of the Communist Party , also has a place in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in a biographical written by fellow Communist Party member, Robin Gollan a historian of the Australian left. Aileen, it seems, was put away. Until Sylvia Martin found her.

Aileen Palmer was born in 1915, Helen in 1917. At the time her parents were struggling to make their living from writing. Neither had an independent income: both came from middle class families.  Nettie’s own background centred upon the Baptist Church where good deeds were prized over monetary gain.  Vance’s family valued respectability and decency.  Rebellion, if that was what it was, did not venture much beyond these bounds despite the couple’s professsed political radicalism. Neither entirely came to terms with Aileen’s choices including her sexuality. Both sisters appear to have struggled against the strictures of their parents’ iron grip. Aileen was the one who did not get away.

When Aileen was a small child the family moved to Queensland  so Vance and Nettie could afford to live on their writing. During her teens  she attended Presbyterian Ladies College in Kew, Melbourne,  and went on to the University of Melbourne to study French literature along with German, Spanish and Russian. She graduated with a first class honors degree in French in 1935. All the while she wrote. Her semi autobiographical novel, ‘Poor Child’, was written during her late teens, explored her passion for a beautiful teacher – part of a rite of passage as she grew into adulthood. At university she was part of a friendship group of women whose political and literary views, if not their sexuality, appealed to her. Aileen was a young woman in formation – using the space that university life provided to explore ideas and identity.

After her graduation the Palmer family  went first to England where Aileen immersed herself in the local politics. She travelled alone to Vienna working as a translator at the while Hitler’s fascism asserted its power. She rejoined her family in Barcelona at the time of the July 1936 insurrection. After her parents departure Aileen volunteered  for the Communist led International Brigade and worked as an interpreter at the English Hospital at Granén on the Aragon Front. She returned to London, and drove ambulances during the Blitz. She appears to have had a serious love affair with ‘B’, who while never identified, appears to have been a woman. Nettie Palmer, her mother, may not have known about this even though, Martin notes, Aileen’s preference for women was clear.

Aileen’s years in Spain and London were the time of her life. It ended in 1945 when she returned, reluctantly, to Australia at her sister’s request after her mother suffered a mild stroke. Helen promptly moved to Sydney leaving Aileen with their parents in Melbourne – subject to their ways that stifled Aileen’s creativity and sexuality. Nor did the milieu in which she lived help.  Aileen’s life was built upon the conventions, constraints and assumptions of elder daughterly duty. Unable to reconcile herself with unconscious strictures  within her family’s life, Aileen broke down. She became an alcoholic; her mind snapped, and for the rest of her life she was admitted to hospital for long periods where she  was treated with new and experimental forms of psychiatry. She attempted psychoanalysis and tried to write.

But this writing, unlike her juvenilia, was often designated the product of a mentally ill person with signs of manic behaviour (p. 276)  and was not taken seriously. Martin does not agree with this view. Nor, eventually, did her sister who began to see the beauty in Aileen’s poetry, and the rhythms and cadences of her writing ( p. 276). Aileen was able to put her emotional experience into words, Martin says. Is it that the clumsiness of psychiatric treatment of the day has obscured talent? This is not to say that the treating psychiatrists were ignorant of such qualities in their patients. But  good work has been lost even if talent has not been undermined. I have heard of paintings, given to carers in gratitude by such talented people, destroyed because they were  thought of as ‘mad art’. Fortunately someone was wise enough to keep Aileen’s work and donate it to a library.

Martin’s  archival mining has produced a number of Aileen’s poems including this one: ‘The dead have no regrets‘ read at the 2016 commemoration of the British and Irish volunteers who went to Spain from 1936 to 1939.

 

Maybe Aileen Palmer absorbed her mother’s ambivalence  about the entire literary enterprise. Palmer had put aside her poetry Aileen was born. She hoped, too, that her daughter would not have ‘ink in her veins’ suggesting that her experience as an author had led her to conclude that a writer’s life was not a desirable one. Palmer continued to write and promote other authors, helping describe Australian literature to the rest of the world and Australia itself.

Aileen may not have known, consciously, of her mother’s doubt, but absorbed it, as if by osmosis.  She wanted more than anything to be remembered as a poet, Martin writes. But  her mother’s injunction, internalised from the the cradle, confused her.  Her more emotionally robust younger sister was not as encumbered. Nor did she suffer, as Aileen did, the mental illnesses that also plagued their uncle, ‘Wob’, Vance Palmer’s brother.  When Aileen finally published her book of poetry, World Without Strangers, it almost co-incided with her mother’s death in 1964. As if by then, Martin writes ‘she could cast off her mother’s shadow’. ( p. 265).

While Martin’s portrait of Aileen takes us into the Spanish Civil War and to the London Blitz, her writing about  1940s and 1950s Melbourne intellectual circles adds much to the historical record. In 1940, true to form for she was always in the front line when it came to doing good,  Nettie Palmer volunteered to assist with the Victorian International Refugee Committee and began teaching English to newly arrived Europeans refugees – among them doctors and architects. One of them was Melbourne psychoanalyst, Hungarian doctor Clara Lazar Geroe who had arrived in Australia in March 1940 with her husband and son after intense lobbying  by a group of doctors and their supporters. These included   Sydney psychoanalyst Roy Coupland Winn and in Melbourne, Paul Dane, Norman Albiston, Reg Ellery and Guy Reynolds. These were Melbourne’s leading psychiatrists working at a time when new ideas and treatments were developing: electroconvulsive therapy, insulin treatment and other medications. Such methods were revolutionising psychiatric treatment – particularly for those suffering psychotic illnesses. Ostensibly  this new medication relieved symptoms enough for people to be treated on an outpatient basis, rather than incarceration. But not without severe side effect and wild experimentation such as the sleeping cure; with lithium where learning about side effects was part of the process. Patients still had long spells in hospital: but months rather than years. At times treatment must have felt worse than the illness. And if Aileen told her story about her life in Spain and England it appears that her carers regarded this as part of her delusional system. Martin relates these events without judgement. Rancour is left to the reader.

Even more so upon reading Martin’s account of Aileen’s psychoanalysis with Clara Geroe. Nettie Palmer had taught  English to Geroe – well enough for her to begin practising psychoanalysis in 1941. At this time Nettie recorded conversations with Geroe: about her frustration about her refugee life; her inability to move about the community without a permit and the prejudicial behaviour she had experienced at the hands of a police officer.  ” You say your’re a doctor! Can’t you read the rules? Says it’splain hatred of the intellectual”. ( p. 237).  Geroe’s dissatisfaction with her emigration and loss of her intellectual world is apparent.

Aileen was to remark that her treatment with Geroe did not help. In fact it made her more depressed, she said.  Geroe did her own bit of undermining. She employed Helen Palmer as a typist requesting that Aileen not be told. She seems to have wanted to be part of the Palmer’s lives. One wonders whether such fragments, recorded in Nettie’s diary, are clues to another story about Geroe’s longing to connect with the world she had lost. Was it that Geroe wanted to recover the place she had left behind in Budapest more than she wanted to practice as a psychoanalyst? Or was it that her ideas about psychoanalysis and how it is practiced are no longer in favour – if they ever were? Geroe was a long way from the land of her birth, training and the accountabilities these implied. Aileen, shocked by her Spanish and English experiences, and by her subsequent emotional collapse, appears not to have found the treatment she needed.

There is much to learn from this biography about a very troubled person who tried so hard. Martin’s accumulation of evidence, carefully collated, is written without judgment but all the while building a portrait of a woman interacting with her world, conscious and unconscious. I walked the streets Aileen. I rode beside her on the battle fields and stood watching, shocked while she pulled bodies from the rubble in London. And then there was the downhill slide…

I finished this book with sadness for a life and talent not realised. I wanted more for Aileen Palmer.  A biographer cannot do better.

 

 

Reference:

Deborah Jordan (2013), ‘In defence of Vance and Nettie’, Overland, No. 10, October 2013.

Distance Psychoanalysis by Ricardo Carlino

19 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in Book Reviews

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I reviewed Carlino’s book early in the life of this blog, here at https://freudinoceania.com//?s=Distance&search=Go

I think it is exceptionally relevant for Australian conditions where there is an inequity in the availability of psychotherapeutic interventions between metropolitan and regional and remote-rural Australia.
Here is another review by Psychoanalyst, Luisa Marino.

LUISA MARINO, PSYCHOANALYST, LONDON

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In this remarkable book Ricardo Carlino (2011, Karnac books) argues that psychoanalysis not only can be applied in a different way from the classical freudian setting, but also courageously tracks the deep meaning of the changes and the paradigms implied in the use of contemporary technologies in this field.

For distance psychoanalysis he means together with a considerable part of the contemporary community of analysts, all those different frames that imply that patient and analyst are not in the same room, but somehow distant in the space. For instance, when we deal with a telephone session, a skype session, with or without the use of the camera, or email exchanges, as well as an entire analysis or a psychotherapy started or continuing using these technologies.

As in the best psychoanalytical tradition he starts to investigate these new methods considering the resistances that they may encounter, specifically among the colleagues themselves…

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Christopher Bollas: ‘China on The Mind’ – Book Review

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Psychoanalysis in Oriental Culture

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I wrote this review which was first published in Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 31. no 1 ( 2013).

Christopher Bollas, China On The Mind, Routledge, London and New York, 2013.
In a sense Christopher Bollas’s ‘China on the Mind’ is a timely piece. China is now taking its place as a significant world power commanding recognition in a way Westerners can no longer ignore. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western colonisers, bent on transmitting their version of civilisation, were met by resistance and withdrawal. The West retired, snubbing China, rendering it mysterious and ineffable, isolated and unreachable far too different to think much about. During Mao Tse Tung’s leadership from 1949 until the early 1970s, the West, in the form of the United States and Australia pretended mainland China did not exist. Taiwan, an island, was recognised instead. Britain recognised mainland China in 1950. In its turn, China, the Middle Kingdom, neither heeded nor needed the West nor anyone else for that matter, even as Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward of the 1960s sent its younger generations to root out old traditions and foundation texts in an effort to join the modern world (Han Suyin, 1967, pp.48-49). But the elders prevailed. Secretly. They maintained Chinese culture, keeping the teachings of the old philosophers and poets hidden beneath the covers of Mao’s Little Red Book. Since Mao’s death ventures into western thought, begun during the early twentieth century, have resumed. In China, psychoanalysis, first introduced in the 1920s, is now being rediscovered by younger generations.

In an interview for the online journal Line of Beauty in 2011,Christopher Bollas described China On The Mind, that he was then writing, as a ‘very strange book’, predicting it would probably not be a big success (Bollas, 2011). It began as a series of lectures for Korean students and was rejected by the course conveners as potentially offensive. But, encouraged by his publisher, he has now released it as an essay. Beginning as an exploration of the differences between Eastern and Western thought it has morphed into a theory of mind that has significant implications for the future study of mental processes. Bollas writes:
In the brief 100 years since psychoanalysis has become the core introspective philosophy of the West, how do we understand its intriguing unconscious integration of eastern and western frames of mind? The maternal order that is foundational to psychoanalysis has been subjected to an ongoing repression within the psychoanalytical movement, but since this represents an eastern way of being and relating, is it possible that growing commerce between east and west will re-repress the maternal order and challenge …paternal focus that has so bound psychoanalytical discourse? (2013 pp 13-14).

There are indications that the individualism of western psychoanalysis and psychology is under critical scrutiny in China. In a case study published during 2011 Psychoanalyst Zhong Jie argues that a patient’s sense of duty to his work unit is not defensive but an expression of his sense of place within the collective. He explains: the concept of oneness (He-Yi) is probably the most important Chinese philosophical idea for understanding the relationship between humans and nature. He continues, this supports the Chinese belief in keeping harmony (He-Xie) and peace (He-Ping), and is the most important principle in Chinese society and family, and also in the Chinese mind and heart. Necessarily, then, needs for freedom, autonomy or earning respect are secondary principles that are controlled by the overriding principle of oneness (Zhong 2011, pp. 218-226).

China, the centre of Eastern thought,is  the location of its foundation texts, even as Japan and Korea have developed their separate forms. Bollas sets out not just to understand the complementarities between the eastern and western minds, but also to demonstrate the unity between them. He is not the first in the psychological field to attempt this. Singapore based psychologist Michael Harris Bond, who has sought to integrate eastern and western subjectivities, has provided a seminal text on the psychology of Chinese people used to brief Western diplomats (Bond, 1990). The idea of the East as against West is also a western construct: a division between self and other. Bollas proceeds cautiously, recognising that the categories ‘East’, ‘West’, ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ are somewhat simplistic, arbitrary and reductionist in their nature nor is the distinction between them absolute. They are also in certain and specific ways inaccurate(p.2). Bollas acknowledges he will have to settle on half truths to develop [his] argument(p.2). One risk is that he will be viewed as utilising ‘Eastern’ culture to develop his particular view of psychoanalysis with the result that the more salient issue, concerning the meaning for the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind of the encounter between cultures with very different foundation matrices, will be lost. His writing is densely layered, building upon his earlier work some thirty volumes – exploring the articulation of the authentic self in psychoanalysis. He is setting the stage for a new creation, a third thinking space, neither one nor the other, but an embodiment of both. His concern is with the interrelation between the individual self and the ethical, social, and divine order of things arguing that this anticipates his broader argument concerning the conflict between the individual and the large group (p.5). Bollas is adding to a body of work on transculturality in group analysis which has enabled commonalities to emerge from profound diversities in cultural matrix including language – within the large group setting (Brown 1996).
Although it appears that difference between Eastern and Western thought is so wide as to be insurmountable, Bollas argues that Eastern and Western thought represent different parts of the mind(p.2). While East and West both regard life as a journey, the two have diverged since antiquity, emphasising different aspects human being (p.7). Western culture is representational, Bollas says. Content is the core of the communication. The eastern mind is presentational, concentrating on the form of being (p.6). Historically the western mind is of the paternal order. categories of communication…are language dependent. These convey the views of the father and, later, the assumptions and laws of society(p.3). Focus is upon exploration of the material world. Logic, rationalism and the focus on the individual have been guiding principles since Plato’s time in Ancient Greece. Myths and legends honour its adventurers, their quests and triumphs, representing and assuming the superiority of western culture. The East, beginning with Turkey and thence towards China, Japan and Korea, followed a different route, concentrating on the maternal aspect of being. Bollas explains: the maternal order refers to the forms of knowledge conveyed to the self as foetus, neonate and infant, prior to the acquisition of language. This is presentational knowledge. The world, as thing, presents itself or is presented and thus leaves impressions on the self(p.2). The mother ‘instructs’ the infant through her actions, Bollas continues. The infant learns from its environment: through sensation- touch, taste sight and sound, transforming these into experience ( p.3). The maternal order emphasises the obligation to live in harmony with nature within the social, natural and cosmic world (p.8). Now, despite following these differing trajectories, East and West are starting to turn to each other Bollas says. In so doing [they] can be seen to complement each other, even if such contiguity may be conflicted(p. 8). Bollas contends that the work of Khan and Winnicott in Britain has enabled the development of a form of psychoanalysis resonant with eastern thought, even though they apparently failed to recognise this antecedent(p.10).

We journey with Bollas as he explores each of the foundation texts: The Book of Changes (I Ching), The Book of Songs, The Book of Rites: and their interpreters Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tsu and Zhuangzi.. We listen to the ancient poets as he draws connections between these and the form embodied in psychoanalysis. Bollas considers each of the texts, beginning with the Book of Changes. Here, each moment is one for contemplation. The player of the I Ching recognises that each of us is chance personified Bollas writes. He continues [This is] not simply a metaphor for the diverse idioms of a human life; playing this game is to unfold in fields of variant human experience… to discover how destiny is entwined with fatep.25). Each throwing Bollas concludes, is an action thought that enables us to think our existencep. 25). The Book of Songs elaborates the idea of selfhood expressed through poetry. Bollas explains: the poem especially is a part of mental life. To hear a poem is to think unthought known experiences; as essential to a Chinese person as language itself(p. 29). Poetry expresses the form of experience. The self lives in a poem, as an individual but also part of shared human experience down generations. A person’s being is transformed…through poetry, into its representatives in the natural world; individual idiom is transferred into selected poetic objects (p.34). We might see this in the writings of Han Suyin, whose allusions to the work of poet Li Po thread through her interpretation of Chinese culture to western readers (Han Suyin, 1942, 1967). Similarly Mao T’se Tung’s composition and reading of poetry, if not his use of Confucian form, serve to elaborate his response to various events in his life. Individual idiom can be detected in the poetry through the ages Bollas writes. It is not in the objects but in the form the poet arranges them (p.34). In this way, he continues,generations have worked to create a mentality that will both house the individual and weave him into the world within which he lives and from which he must depart.(p.34).

If The Book of Songs finds resonance in Winnicott’s conceptualisations of the true self, then The Book of Rites concerns the false, protective self. Confucius, the main interpreter of The Book of Rights, posited an order of being in relation to others so as to tame and manage nature a process elaborated upon by Lao Tsu. Both argued for the ideal self, able to live in harmony with nature. These writings order thought and one’s place in the social and familial structure, teaching what it is to be moral and ethical person. And lest it be assumed there is no Oedipal configuration…there are unusual restrictions placed on the eldest son in the filial relation to the father and to elders,Bollas writes. The Book of Rites teaches the distinction between men and beasts….[it] boils down to a set of regulations which aim to prevent the sort of mess Oedipus got himself into with Jocasta (p.44). To read the Tao Te Ching ‘The Way’- is to be reminded of Bion’s remarks on the ineffability of ‘O and one’s struggle with ‘K’ and ‘-K’.Implicit is the idea of the maternal function or reverie, and in analysis, Bion’s notion of evenly suspended attention irritable reaching for fact and reason. A baby and mother act and react upon each other ostensibly building a history together. We are formed and reformed in relationship with others. The Tao takes this further: we are each our own but inevitably a part of the whole even before birth.
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In Western psychoanalysis the unconscious is the self’s creativity Bollas writes (p.60). It combines paternal and maternal the boundedness of the analytic hour the paternal – holding the [maternal] space (p.61). In the work of Winnicott and Khan, Bollas says, we can see the intersection between presentational and representational order. The analyst stands aside, enabling and holding the space for free association thoughtless speech .Through this it is possible to surmise the patterns of these relationships between self and other, to hear a stunningly articulate private discourse(p.110). The analyst’s quietness, by not interfering with the analysand’s gesture or speech, allows the patient to hear from themselves, from their parents, from their ancestors, and from their culture(pp. 110-12).

One always exists in relation to the environment. One is a singular entity and yet irrevocably part of something larger, simultaneously influencing and being effected by its process. A mother and her infant act upon each other, forming and shaping one another. Each movement or gesture between them originates in past family and social relationships. As a member of a couple, family or group we each embody a heritage that is familial and social, past and present. It is a view resonant with Chinese Eastern thought: the individual holds a place in harmony with the broader matrix. Individualism, so prized by westerners, emerges in relationship with the whole.

Already Bollas’s book has its detractors. In a review published online in April 2013, Thomas Friedman argues that Bollas’s ‘idealism’ of Eastern thought also undermines the psychoanalytic project, by introducing a religious point of view through a back door approach of linking Chinese philosophy with the psychoanalytic praxis(his term) of Donald Winnicott and Masud Khan Friedman continues, a further connection is made to the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein, Bion and Rosenfeld as he morphs his book from the Chinese philosophers to his own preferred view of psychoanalysis Not only that but Bollas encourages the abandonment of free association, and the importance of verbal memory(Friedman, 2013).

While respondents to this piece criticised Friedman for his errors concerning Bollas’s views on free association, Bollas’s and Friedman’s essential conflict over the nature and purpose of psychoanalysis, which has its roots in the history of psychoanalytic thought, remains. From 1920 through to 1940s psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, criticised the notion that psychology applied only to the individual. He eventually rejected Freud’s libidinal theory as he sought to reconcile Marxist and Freudian thought. Following Bachoven’s idea of the maternal principle he developed a theory of the mature individual existing within a social and historical matrix (Jay, 1971, pp.91-100). In his forward to Peter Rudnytsky’s edited collection of essays, Rescuing Psychoanalysis From Freud (2011) Brett Kahr asks us to consider that Freud may not have understood his creation. By ousting or marginalising his detractors, amongst them Jung, Stekel, Adler and Ferenczi, Freud threatened to limit psychoanalysis by his conservatism and orthodoxy. Rudnytsky’s recovery of these and other analysts, and his development of a ‘thought-line’ from Ferenczi through to Winnicott and Coltart also rescues psychoanalysis’s creative and maternalist – potential (Kahr in Rudnytsky, 2011, p.xvi). Similarly, Bollas says Freud misunderstood his discovery. ?reud found psychoanalysis. It might have been a gift from the East of which he was unawarep.134).

Friedman, who fears for the scientific recognition for which psychoanalysis has strived since Freud, shares much with Zhong Jie (2011) who wonders about the potential loss of Chinese culture as a result of globalisation. It has only just survived Mao’s attack. Bollas is also concerned about the future of psychoanalysis but in a different way; unless psychoanalysis can re-integrate maternal and paternal principles it risks being lost. He suggests that group relations work might help to engender a transgenerational social mind [with] the task of collecting a vision of a de-centred mind, a mind that could never be individually or even nationally defined, but that can be positioned as a potential space for group thinking (p. 117). This is not about recognition of East as exotic, nor merely giving it a voice: both these positions privilege western thought and detract from Bollas’s central thesis the integration of the maternal and paternal in mental functioning. It is rather more than an interesting idea or product of Bollas’s antipathy to psychoanalysis as Freidman and his ilk imply. As Chinese psychoanalyst Yang Yunping writes: psychoanalysis belongs to no-one. It overflows from the framework that attempts to constrain it despite those professional societies that appear to wish to represent it absolutely(Yang 2011, pp.733-743).

References

Bollas, C. (2011) Unconscious Thinking Out of Bounds: Christopher Bollas as Thinker and Artist :Interview with Anneleen Masschelein . Retrieved from http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/s/article/view/67/136)

Bond, M. H.and Hwang K. (1990). The social psychology of the Chinese people. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The psychology of the Chinese people. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown D. (1995). Group analysis, transculturality and ethics. British Journal of Psychotherapy. 12(2), 170-177.

Friedmann, H. J. (2013). China on the mind by Christopher Bollas, review, International Psychoanalysis. Retrieved from http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/2013/04/03/china-on-the-mind-by-christopher-bollas/ .

Han S. (1960). Destination Chungking. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Han S. (1967). China in the year 2001. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books.

Hofstede, G. & Bond, M. H. (2009). The Confucius connection. Retrieved from http://www2.seminolestate.edu/falbritton/Summer%202009/FHI/Articles/Hofstede.confucious%20connection%20120505%20science%20direct.pdf

Jay, M. (1971). The dialectical imagination. London: Heinemann Educational Books.

Nandy, A.(1995). The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Rudnytsky, P. L. (2011). Rescuing psychoanalysis from Freud and other essays in revision. London: Karnac.

Said. E. (2003). Freud and the non European, London and New York: Verso.

Yang Yunping. ( 2011). The challenge of professional identity for Chinese clinicians in the process of learning and practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy: the discussion on the frame of Chinese culture. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 92 (3),733-743.

Zhong Zie. (2011). Working with Chinese patients: Are there conflicts with Chinese culture and psychoanalysis? International Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis. 8 (3), 218-226.