Category Archives: Clara Geroe

The end of the dream: Clara Lazar Geroe and the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1940- 1945

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in 1940s, Clara Geroe

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On 17th August 1940 the Sydney based psychoanalyst Roy Coupland Winn wrote to Clara Geroe,the Hungarian trained psychoanalyst who had arrived in Australia on a refugee Visa five months earlier. ‘Considering the fact that there seems little likelihood of starting an institute in Melbourne, why not practise in Sydney? You, [Siegfried] Fink and I could commence a clinic’. Fink was a German born psychoanalyst, also refugee, who had arrived in 1938. Winn continued:  ‘It may be a mistaken idea but I think that three analysts would make more rapid progress than two, just as two than one; I am of the opinion that analysts tend to advertise and feed each other, partly because as the practice of each is necessarily small each has to send any overflow that arises to be done by others; thus each also receives advertisement from each other’.

It was a tempting offer.  Clara Geroe and her family had landed in Melbourne on the strength of a promise, a donation of five thousand pounds by a benefactor, Lorna Traill, for the commencement of an institute for psychotherapy.   The family was on its way to Sydney, she wrote later.  A place like Buda, with hills all around but close to the sea. But a Melbourne based psychiatrist Dr Paul Dane – a man with a dream – had  argued, successfully, that the Traill funds were to be used to establish an institute for psychoanalysis along the lines of the British one headed by Ernest Jones. In Melbourne.  Dane had written to Jones about it. Jones, in turn, always a supporter of psychoanalysis, particularly if it was a medical enterprise, encouraged its development. But the donation had not materialized. Traill had withdrawn her offer. Negotiations were continuing. Geroe had had to wait it out.

In her reply to Winn Geroe said that the Melbourne group had managed to retrieve a thousand pounds from Traill.  Another five hundred pounds was  promised if the Institute was opened on the benefactor’s birthday. It was barely a viable figure but Ernest Jones had given the project his blessing. Sydney though would be sidelined.  It would be only a Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis, Geroe continued. Not the Australian Institute originally envisaged. Geroe would have preferred to start small she wrote in her notebooks. She would have liked to have built up a following before launching such a complex project as an Institute. But Traill had made the condition  that an institute was founded with the funds. Geroe could do no more than shrug her shoulders and comply.

The Melbourne Institute for Psychoanalysis was duly opened on 11 October 1940, Lorna Traill’s birthday. Roy Winn made the long journey from Sydney to attend. Judge Foster from the Children’s Court led the proceedings. A coterie of psychiatrists – Reg Ellery, Norman Albiston, Albert Phillips among them, all attended along with  local educationalists, nurses and workers from the Children’s Court Clinic. In July 1941 Geroe was made a member of the British Institute of Psychoanalysis and appointed as a training analyst. Jones, one might say, had captured the Australian Dominion for his Empire.

All the while Geroe was bitter, sad, and upset about having to leave the intellectual, cafe culture of Budapest. She was trying to settle into Melbourne,  in a land on the other side of the world, far from the pastoral beauty to which she was accustomed. As far as she was concerned Melbourne was a back-water. If her husband’s decision to leave Hungary and Nazi Europe was prescient, Geroe was a trailing spouse. She was not accepted by the Australian government on the basis of the work as a psychoanalyst. In fact none of the six psychoanalysts with whom she had applied for a visa, first to New Zealand and when that was refused, to Australia, were considered eligible for entry. Her husband’s experience as an accounts manager in a factory making magnesium bricks was most probably the reason for the family’s acceptance. That, and his decision to seek the assistance of a local Sydney solicitor, Eric Jones who, somehow, managed to obtain visas for the family.  Their own application  made directly to the Australian government through Australia House in London had failed two weeks earlier. The Geroe family left Budapest on 20 January 1940.

On Friday  20 April 1945, about four years after the opening of the  Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis, three of the Board members met with Clara Geroe, at the office at 111 Collins Street, the rooms rented from the Union Bank of Australia by Dr Paul Dane.  Dane, the founder of the Institute, along with psychiatrists Guy Reynolds and Albert Phillips had called the meeting ‘to deal with the matter of the renewal of Dr Geroe’s agreement with the Institute’.

Geroe was employed by the Institute as its resident training analyst on  14 January 1941.  Her  second two year  contract expired on 14th January 1945.  By April 1945 it was clear that the Institute’s financial position was such that ‘it could not be renewed’.  At this stage it was agreed that Clara would continue at the Institute for a salary of four guineas a week. Of this she would pay three guineas a week a rent for the use of the rooms, telephone and so on. Five hours of her time would be devoted to the Institute’s Clinic, providing services on behalf of the Institute.

Matters did not improve. On 3rd August 1945, another meeting was held, this time to discuss Dr Paul Dane’s decision to resign as Chair of the Board. The Institute’s financial situation was more than  perilous: Dane, it appeared, had fallen behind in his rental payments – perhaps  a result of his absence through illness.  He owed forty five pounds to the Institute. But Clara and her husband, Vilmos,  a trained accountant, had compiled a financial statement and proposal showing that the Institute could continue  for a further thirteen months. ‘It was decided to carry on’, the psychiatrist Reg Ellery noted in the Minutes. He continued, ‘Dr Geroe proposed to continue her work for the Institute without a fee’. This, of course, ‘was willingly agreed to’.  Geroe took on Dane’s share of the rent and his rooms, with the proviso that he could return at any time. Frank Graham, Geroe’s first trainee was elected as a member of the Board.

On 23 September 1945 a third meeting was held between Geroe, Graham, Ellery and Guy Reynolds. Paul Dane had decided to take twelve months leave of absence on consenting to withdraw his resignation as Chairperson. An Acting Chairperson, Albert Phillips,  was appointed.  Clara Geroe was elected to the Board and, along with Dane and Graham,  approved as a subtenant of  111 Collins Street.

Most importantly Clara Geroe was recognized by the Board as ‘no longer an employee of the Institute but  ‘voluntarily agrees to give without any renumeration the same services [to the Institute’s Clinic]  as heretofore; and that her previous agreement with the Institute is null and void since 3rd August 1945’.

And so Clara Geroe’s psychoanalytic career, begun in Hungary in 1926, entered its longest phase.

 

References:

 

Roy Winn to Clara Geroe 17 August 1940

Clara Geroe – draft reply to Winn, c August 1940

Clara Geroe, notebooks in English language, c. 1940.

Minutes of the Board of the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis – No 20, 20 April, 1945;

No 21 undated; No 22, 3 August 1945; No 23, 28 September 1945.

Oral History interview with George Geroe about his mother, Clara Lazar Geroe

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, Clara Geroe, Oral History

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My interview with George Geroe about his mother, Clara Lazar Geroe, Australia’s first training analyst, appointed thus by the Ernest Jones, president of both the International Psychoanalytic Association and the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1939-40, is posted on the online journal, Psychoanalysis Downunder. The link is here.

More About Clara Geroe : Australia’s first training analyst

30 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Clara Geroe

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Living where I do I learned that George Geroe lived locally. George is the son of Clara Lazar Geroe, appointed by Ernest Jones of the British Psychoanalytical Society as Australia’s first Training Analyst in 1940. Formerly a local GP, George is now retired. Ann Geroe, his wife, is a ceramicist of note whose work is held in, amongst other places the National Gallery of Victoria. She is no longer able to work, although, she tells me, a retrospective of her work is to be at a local gallery in the near future.

Some weeks ago I wrote George a letter of introduction. I explained that I would like to interview him about his mother. She was the only one of 6 refugee applicants, psychoanalysts sponsored by Ernest Jones in England and Paul Dane here in Australia, who arrived in this country in 1940. In later life she is reported to have said it was because she had a child that she was allowed to emigrate There were two others, Andrew Peto and his wife Elizabeth Kardos, But they remained behind in Hungary. It was not until 1948, after Elizabeth had died that Andrew Peto successfully re applied for a permit to enter Australia..  What became of the other five applicants is not known. The family had originally applied to enter New Zealand, as much to do with Willi Geroe’s interest in the outdoor life and the possibilities for that rather than anything else, according to his son.

George’s response to my note was at once a surprise and a delight. A surprise because, as he explained, I had somehow forgotten to include my phone number on the letter. His daughter looked it up for him. He was very happy to talk to me. He had read this blog, seen the post regarding his mother, and thought there were a few things to put straight.And in an interview lasting 118.02 minutes, he told me why.

Amongst other things Clara’s interest in psychoanalysis did not begin in her teens as she had related in an interview several years before she died in 1980. She had snuck into a lecture given by the psychoanalyst Ferenczi when he was garrisoned in her home town Papa in Hungary. Her elder sisters, both of them teachers, and almost twenty years older than her, had decided to go along. She, aged 16, had tagged along. It was not until she was working as a doctor in her twenties that she began to reflect upon human behaviour and, at the age of 26, began training as a psychoanalyst. Her medical training, affected by the disruptions of war, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the aftermath the great war, was hard won but necessary. Her sisters, much older than her had had an easier run: Clara realised she would have to look after herself and qualified as a doctor.

George related the early years after the family arrived in Australia were very very difficult. Both Clara and Willi had little English, money was tight. Clara concentrated on learning the language. She had several patients she could work with using the French of German languages, if not Hungarian. Willi, despite his credentials as a corporate lawyer, was unable to find a job. Subject to the prejudices meted out to refugees he was obliged to accept low level jobs – although he could have undertaken the relevant Australian exams to register. Is that so easy when one is a refugee? Particularly when Australian society had little experience of emigration other than from England. Clara, too, faced prejudice from the medical fraternity although supported in her work by her sponsor, Dr Paul Dane.

George’s account of his parents’ lives  is compassionate and thoughtful.  He alludes to differences of opinion between himself and his mother – Ann was’ the one girl I met that she liked’ –  and the impact and stress of the work as a psychoanalyst created for her – and himself as well as his father. He acknowledges the very real friendship between Anna Freud and his mother and, indeed, the support that Anna may have provided for Clara. Ann noted that Clara used to send Anna Freud food parcels during WW2. Clara was a cultured woman,George said. She never drove, Ann related. Willi drove her into the city for work in the morning. She was always late, says George and, when she was not in her professional realm, lived the life of a Hungarian middle-class woman. Her sister, who emigrated from Hungary in the  1950s lived with Clara and Willi, cooking and keeping for her. Her Hungarian cooking is fondly remembered. Clara – ‘Klarie’ – was also a proud grandmother: deeply loved by her grandchildren as well as her daughter-in-law. And son.

I am hoping that the recording of these interviews along with the transcripts will be accepted by the a reference library somewhere… if anything they will help colour in the life and career of this most extraordinary woman, one who found herself in a role she hardly expected to be undertaking. She was not in favour of emigrating from Europe. The advent of the Nazis and war stymied that idea. Willi saw to it that they made it out, according to George. And like many refugee families they had their problems as well as their triumphs.

And here, too, if they are reading this, I would like to thank two very kind and generous people – George and Ann Geroe – who made themselves available for this project. They and I know that it was not an easy undertaking.

On ‘A Reluctant Immigrant’ – Clara Geroe, The Meanjin Interview

04 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by in Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, Clara Geroe, Narrative and Memoir

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There is relatively little material available in the public domain about Australia’s first training analyst, Clara Geroe. Several online biographies outlining her contribution and influence on psychoanalysis in Australia after her arrival in 1940  tress her professional work while moving swiftly across her ‘refugee story’. These accounts are based on the interviews she gave to Douglas Kirsner in 1977 and 1979 and published in Meanjin in 1983.  The impact of Geroe’s arrival, a watershed in the development of the psychoanalytic discipline in Australia, and her longer term influence is still being absorbed. She was a medical practitioner, relating first and foremost to those in that profession. But she also recognised lay professionals and drew these practitioners into her circle. Less conscious perhaps, is the influence not just of her European background in a country which stressed Englishness and upheld the White Australia policy, but also of her refugee/migrant experience. Clara described herself as a ‘reluctant immigrant’: she did not wish to leave Europe and only came to Australia’ because Hitler came to Europe’. Her link with Britain legitimized her status and presence: she was Australia’s first qualified and approved training analyst under the aegis of the British Institute for Psychoanalysis.

During the last two decades historians have been able to provide a good account of the encroachment of Nazism on daily life in Europe; they have been able to investigate the response of governments outside Europe, providing context for the types of decisions, and circumstances people such as Clara Geroe were facing. Let us begin with Kristallnacht.

On 6 November 1939, Herschel Grynszpan, aged 17, a young man of  Jewish German origin, bought a gun, loaded it with 5 bullets, and walked into the German Embassy in Paris. He shot one of the diplomats Ernst vom Rath  three times in the abdomen -an act of revenge for his family’s expulsion from Germany. It was the excuse the German authorities needed, the historian, Martin Gilbert explains. On 9- 10 November, Kristallnacht, Nazi stormtroopers conducted systematic raids in cities and towns across the country. Synagogues were smashed, homes and businesses broken into and looted. Jewish families were rounded up made to stand and wait outside in the cold night for hours. Women and children were separated from their menfolk who were deported to the concentration camps for several weeks. They returned  with orders to leave the country, to go to any country that would take them.

The trouble was, as Louise London pointed out in her 2004 book, Whitehall and the Jews, few countries would do so. Great Britain, acting on policies developed in conjunction with the USA in 1933-4, and London shows, fearing that the influx of foreigners would undermine its social fabric, limited its intake essentially to women and children – to be employed in service. Few men were admitted. Many who did make it avoided internment by joining the British Armed Forces.  Those who were not of German origin fared better – for a time. Despite this reluctance to accept refugees, members of the psychoanalytic profession, led by Britain’s Ernest Jones, became  one of the few professional groups to lobby for  European colleagues at risk of Nazi persecution. The Freud family was an exception. Even so when the family arrived in London Anna Freud fearing repercussions for those left behind, asked reporters to stress they had been well treated.

Australia was slow on the up-take and New Zealand, too, was closing its doors. While there had been some co operation between Britain and the Dominions concerning intake during the interwar years, this had dwindled from about 1933 – due to concerns about an influx of  undesirables – possibly communists and revolutionaries in the guise of refugees.  (London 2000:43).

To leave one’s country of birth with no possibility of return: to relinquish its sights, sounds and smells; to be without the mirroring of one’s self within one’s community is in the realm of accumulating psychic trauma. In their book, Migration and Exile, Lesn and Rebeca Grinberg show how one may respond to such dislocation by becoming frozen in time, relating internally to the culture left behind; becoming, perhaps even more ‘European’ or more ‘English than English’ , more of whatever was part of one’s roots than those that remained behind. For Clara Lazar Geroe, her ultimate arrival in Melbourne was the culmination of a long story of doubt, uncertainty and dislocation. She told some of this in two interviews with Melbourne researcher Douglas Kirsner, the first held in 1977 and second in 1979 – shortly before her death in 1980. This was compiled by Judith Brett these were  published in Meanjin in1983.

For Australian psychoanalysts Clara Lazar Geroe effectively parachuted into the local scene. While much of its historiography, including Joy Damousi’s Freud in the Antipodes  stresses the activity of medical practitioners. he first two qualified medically trained analysts were Sydney based.  Dr Roy Coupland Winn who qualified first as an Associate and then as a full member of the British Psychoanalytical Society set up in private practice in 1931. The second qualified analyst, Dr Fink who arrived in 1938 from Germany – another escapee from Nazi Germany – was a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. He worked in the New South Wales mental health services before entering private practice. Paul Dane in Melbourne was another key figure. Lay people: educationalists and psychologists – including workers in the child guidance movement, found their way to psychoanalysis through psychology and philosophy studies at the major universities. As in Britain and Europe and building on the work of the Child Study movement,  the child guidance movement was developing with psychological clinics as far afield as Perth in Western Australia as well as in the eastern states.

By 1940 the theory and practice of psychoanalysis was a lively arena, of discussion and debate – if the press is any reflection. Psychoanalytic ideas were rubbing shoulders with those from psychology, philosophy and education since the early 1920s – also traced by Damousi. There was Sir Francis Anderson whose leadership of The Australian Association for Psychology and Philosophy and its journal was instrumental in the dissemination of psychoanalytic  ideas in the Australian community from 1923. The Association held regular meetings, with branches in the main capital cities. Professor John Anderson also from the University of Sydney combined philosophy and psychoanalysis in his work. At a community level and in regional areas talks were given to through the Workers Education Associations.  In 1937 British psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs, an associate of Melanie Klein,  visited Australia for the New Education Fellowship Conference which, after preliminary sessions in New Zealand,  travelled to each of Australia’s state capitals from 1 August and 20 September 1937. Isaacs was waited upon by senior Canberra women – from the Governor General’s wife down! Ruth Thomas a Western Australian based psychologist returned from England to attend the conference as did educationalist and psychologist Madeleine Ekenberg after a ten year absence. Ekenberg, who took the time to visit her folks in Singleton, New South Wales, warrants a post in this blog in her own right. She was working with child psychotherapist Margaret Lowenfeld at the London Institute of Child Psychology. Clara Geroe’s arrival may have provided locals with the impetus to formalise, and centralise.

Clara Lazar Geroe was born on 4 October 1900 in Papa in Hungary,  was the daughter  of Adolf Adam Lazar, wholesale grocer, and his wife Ilona, née Lusztig. Although Jewish, Clara completed her secondary schooling at the local Calvinist college. During WWI when the psychoanalyst Ferenczi was garrisoned in her town with his regiment she snuck into one of his lectures with her two older sisters who had been invited to the event. By Clara’s own account, she obtained one of his books from the local bookshop -which had brought them in knowing the author was in town, and after reading it felt she had found her vocation. By her son’s account she was little interested in psychoanalysis at that stage. In about 1923 she completed her medical studies in Prague and, back in Budapest in 1925 and working in a hospital for nervous disorders,  was accepted for training with the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Society. Seminar teachers included anthropologist Geza Roheim amd Michael Balint on infant development. She said of this period:

One didn’t have as long an analysis as now and the rules were less strict. In Australia today I am the only one of the training analysts who sees trainees only four times a week. The others all keep strictly to five times a week because that is the ruling. And whereas nowadays analysts and trainees avoid meeting at public places or seminars no-one worried about this during my training… Probably some of the complexities of the transference relationship were not recognised then.

In in his 2002 book, The Hitler Emigres, British historian Daniel Snowman has traced the influence of Jewish refugees upon British Culture: the arts, music, literature, the law. He  points out that young Jewish people in the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries  were aware that certain professions were barred from them. Politics, the public service and indeed the Church were closed to Jewish people. They were pushed out. Rather, many gravitated to Law or Medicine or indeed the studies of economics, philosophy, music literature or journalism and publishing. Many thought of themselves as ‘assimilated’, Snowman goes onto say, arguing that those who aspired to culture and sophistication thought of themselves as members of their home country’s culture. It implied rejection of ‘partisan ideology, separatism, exclusivity, dogma- Jewish or any other – and in their place, the aspiration to embrace universal truths and the whole of humanity. These were the sentiments of the press and the academy, not of the army, church or politics’. And it separated them from the the unsophisticated basic lives of Eastern European Jews, those who had not made it, ‘people without a culture who clung to outmoded attitudes’, Snowman continues.  Germany stood for urban and urbane life, Snowman continues. Not the fields and the ghetto, but for emancipation and enlightenment rather than atavistic obscurantism. (Snowman 2002: 8). Jews who served in WWI and were awared the Iron Cross felt they belonged; they were German rather than Jews. One can only imagine their profound sense of betrayal on Kristallnacht.

Perhaps this sense of whether or not one belonged was less of an issue in Hungary than Germany. Jewish people assumed they did belong. The Historian Bernard Wasserstein traces these in his 2012 book, On The Eve. From 1867 when acts were passed freeing Jewish people from legal restrictions  Jewish people had prospered moving into the professions and into the nobility… Antisemitism seemed to belong to a less civilised past’. They felt at home in Hungarian  From 1920, though there was a harbinger of things to come. The reappearance of the numerous clausus, a quota system enacted into law in 1920, restricted admission to university no more than 6 per cent of  student of Jewish origin. it was the first anti -semitic law in interwar Europe. ( Wasserstein, 2012: 28).

For Geroe, being a psychoanalyst in Europe was part of being part of cultured community. ‘Analysis was a cultural and vocational interest and not extremely lucrative’, she explained in her interview with Kirsner. ‘You had to be a bit of revolutionary to become interested, to think for yourself and not be with the establishment’. There was no distinction between medical and non-medical people, she continued… Perhaps this was a rather pointed comment. Tension over such distinctions rumble still in the local Australian scene if not elsewhere. And, as if to add to the halcyon days of the past Geroe remembered, ‘No-where were women treated more equally than in analytic circles’. Child analysis was also developing during the 1920s and 1930s. Geroe worked with Alice Balint in a children’s clinic which closed down when the Nazis came. Anna Freud’s work was commencing; there were meetings in Budapest and Vienna. The group also received patronage from leading families. Geroe explained:

The Baroness Herzog endowed the Analytical Society with a villa in a beautiful forest where fifty children, most of whom were in analysis, would come for two to three months in the summer. We would give them sessions once or twice a week to see how they were reacting to the therapeutic milieu.

August Aichhorn, whose work with delinquent children was based in milieu therapy, was very interested in this project, she continued. Aichhorn had begun the first child guidance clinics in Vienna in 1927.

The reason Geroe came to Australia with her family  was ‘because Hitler came to Europe’, she said flatly.  It had been a good life before that, a ‘happy well-ordered life’. She had had no intention of immigrating. But during the 1930s life had become oppressive, as it had for all Jewish people.

Uniformed police were always present at our (psychoanalytic) meetings. Their presence was mainly to vex us,  but if they could have put their finger on anything they would have suspended the Society immediately. Everything intellectual in which Jews took part was suspicious and persecuted, and perhaps more than half our members were Jews or counted as Jews according to the Nuremberg laws. Still we had our practices and it was a hard decision to leave.

By the end of the 1930s antisemitism was official state policy in Hungary. Many sought escape by converting to Christianity. Others such as Geroe were being forced to face the fact that the future for them if they remained in their homeland was dire. There were visitations and warnings from abroad. In 1937 when Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia she had barely heard of Australia let alone New Zealand. Britain sent someone to help. Geroe explains.

 Dr John Rickman of the British Society came to Budapest to advise us how to get out and where we could go. We heard of countries about which we knew almost nothing and New Zealand was one of these. It was suggested to several of us that we should try and get a permit to New Zealand. The emphasis was on those people who were child analysts and interested in education because New Zealand had recently hosted a large international congress on the New Education Fellowship  Movement which Susan Isaacs had attended. There was a lot of interest in modern educational ideas in New Zealand, more than in Australia at the time.

What went on at the 1938 -9 Psychoanalytic Congress in Paris, what discussions were had, the emotional atmosphere, and the urgency with which European Jewish Psychoanalysts sought assistance from their international colleagues can only be imagined. A group of Hungarians at the 1938-9 Psychoanalytic Congress in Paris then met with Ernest Jones who, Geroe says, confirmed that there was an interest in Analysis in New Zealand, but mainly child analysis. From initial perusal of the New Zealand’s digitised newspaper collection: Papers Past, this seems not to have been accurate. It may be that the British Rickman, so far away from Australia, had not grasped that his colleague, Susan Isaacs, had spent most of her time in Australia. Perhaps in the way of these things, and not fully apprised of the details he had heard she was leaving for New Zealand… but not much more. It was enough to encourage hope for these people so desperate and far away.  Geroe and  four or five colleagues applied for admission to New Zealand.  Contacts were made and letters written – to Duncan Hall the Colonial Secretary at the League of Nations.  The New Zealand Government refused them. Twice.

New Zealand’s refusal of the applications of six prospective analyst refugees, and Australia accepted but two of them is a story in itself.  Judith Brett‘s short biography  of Geroe  published in the Australian Dictionary of Biography which traces these events is a master of understatement:

At the International Psycho-Analytical Congress, held in Paris in 1938, Clara had explored the possibility of six Hungarian analysts emigrating to New Zealand. Their applications were refused. A group of Australians—including Bishop E. H. Burgmann, the doctors R. S. Ellery, R. C. Winn and Paul Dane, and (Sir) Charles Moses—took up their case with the Commonwealth Department of Immigration. Of the six, only Clara was accepted. She later surmised that she was selected because she had a child. With her husband Vilmos Gerö (William Geroe)—whom she had married on 27 August 1927 in Budapest—and their son, she arrived in Melbourne on 14 March 1940.

In Europe things were deteriorating. It became more and more urgent to leave Hungary. Geroe, finally, was able to get a visa – for Australia… perhaps ‘because I had a child and Australia was always keen to get families’. Then the permit was cancelled when war broke out. She was relieved at first. ‘ I was so ambivalent about leaving that I was glad we could stay, but then after some months our permit was renewed because Hungary was not a declared enemy in the war’.

What finally tipped the balance for Geroe is any one’s guess. Daily life for Jewish people was becoming impossible. In May 1938 another anti-jewish law was passed in Hungary cancelling the licenses of Jewish small business owners and subjecting Jewish in the professions to the numerus clausus– a quota. ( Wasserstein, 365). Another law was passed in May 1939 -‘adopting a racial rather than a religious definition of Jewishness. It severely curtailed Jewish economic activity and civil rights, restricted Jewish participation in the professions and required the dismissal of Jewish civil servants ( it was possible in Hungary to be a civil servant until then) theatre directors and editors of the general press. Only those Jews whose ancestors had lived in the country before 1867 retained the vote. The 7,500 foreign Jews in the country were ordered to leave’. ( Wasserstein, 405). Geroe may have had no choice… And then there was Kristallnacht.

Paul Dane was waiting for Geroe when she arrived at Melbourne in March 1940. Again there were promises. There was talk of grants for the establishment of a psychoanalytic organisation… but overseas qualified medical practitioners did not have automatic registration in Australia. Geroe, nevertheless, began work at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne – the first to do any child psychiatry at all. In October 1940 the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis was opened with money donated by Miss Lorna Traill. There was a lot of interest and good will Geroe remembered, ‘partly because people wanted to help the European refugees and do something against Hitler’.  Geroe, appointed as the analyst of the Institute, was to give three hours a day to institute patients – and was paid 4 guineas a week. She was to see every new patient- difficult because all new patients had to be seen by a registered doctor. She wanted to set up a free clinic – for what she called ‘analytic psychotherapy. There was also her children’s clinic. Her project.

This was a bit of a private war of mine. I had made a promise to myself that as I was lucky enough to come away from Hungary  safely with my family, I would never turn away from the institute for financial reasons any child who needed help. I kept to it as long as I was physically able.

Perhaps the world Geroe had left so abruptly was always with her. Perhaps she was never entirely reconciled with its loss. Stanley Gold writes sensitively of Geroe’s sadness: ‘She brought with her a great love of psychoanalysis and in particular its application to the education and development of children, and a life-long nostalgia for the early days of the psychoanalytic movement with its camaraderie and intellectual radicalism’. Perhaps a legacy of her European life was  her belief that people at all levels of the community should have the opportunity to ‘explore psychoanalysis as a meaningful intellectual and philosophical discipline and to develop techniques for its application within society’.(Meanjin 1983).

REFERENCES:

Stanley Gold, ‘The Early History’, Meanjin, 3/1983, pp. 342-351

Clara Lazar Geroe, ‘A Reluctant Immigrant’ ( from an interview with Douglas Kirsner compiled by Judith Brett), Meanjin, 3/1983, pp. 352-357.

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

Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Disaster, London, Harper Press, 2006.

Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews: 1933-1948: British immigration Policy and the Holocaust, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Daniel Snowman, The Hitler migres: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism, London, Chatto and Windus, 2002.

Bernard Wasserstein, On The Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War. New York, Simon and Schuster, 2012.