Category Archives: historical source material

“TROVE” the National Library of Australia’s jewel, has been saved!!!

03 Monday Apr 2023

Posted by in Archive work, Australian History, Historical research, historical source material, Newspaper reportage, Newspapers

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Late in 2022 the National Library issued bleak news. It’s online archival resource, TROVE would close down in mid 2023 if it did not get substantial funding. The politics are complex, but briefly, it has taken a change of national government for the value of this resource to be properly acknowledged. For just this morning the announcement has come through. TROVE would be re-funded to the tune of 33 Million dollars over four years.. enough to go on with.

Here is that link. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/funding-pledge-saves-national-library-s-trove-from-closure-threat-20230402-p5cxdn.html

TROVE has been instrumental in the development of this blog. I began with a question. What did ordinary Australian folk know and think about psychoanalysis during the twentieth century? The perception abroad was ‘not much’. And why would they? the argument went. These were the legendary Jack and Jills of all trades, the egalitarian bushman was assumed to be anti intellectual.

Nothing could be further from reality. TROVE threw up some answers. How the ‘Kalgoorlie Miner’ published a piece on Freud’s dreams in 1903, or republished it from the magazine Household Words; how the Workers Education Association ) WEA found its most popular choice of subject was psychology. During the 1920s and 1930s people living places as far away from the metropoles as the mining centres of Rockhampton and Charters Towers in Queensland, Broken Hill in far west New South Wales. These were the towns of the workers, and a particular political force in Britain well as Australia. People in the cities Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth read about Freud and his ideas in their local newspapers. Even the Catholic Advocate, speaking against psychoanalysis, based its argument on a knowledgeable reading of Freud. Interest in psychoanalysis was not limited to the medical profession in Australia. Nor was Australia too far away from developments in Europe. The overseas cabled news networks and Australia’s overland telegraph saw to that!!

Then there was the discovery and recovery of Ivy Bennett, Australia’s first trained lay analyst, a participant in Anna Freud’s first training program commenced in 1947. Bennett, an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, practised in Perth from 1952 until 1958 when she returned to England to gain her full qualification with the British Psychoanalytical Society thus making her eligible for membership of the International Psychoanalytical Society.

Freud’s rescue from Vienna in 1938 was widely reported across the Australian nation as was his arrival in Paris on 6 June 1938. The famous photographs of him with Anna Freud, smiling from their train carriage window, were published in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ in Sydney, and Brisbane. Editors in those days did not spend so much money on images unless they were sure of recovering their costs.

TROVE’s rescue enables deeper study, interrogation of detail, and investigation of important historical questions in Australian psychoanalytic history, and certainly in other cultural arenas. We need accurate histories to understand where we come from, and how cultural institutions were formed.

On Clara Lazar Geroe’s personal library: thinking about biography

09 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Historical research, historical source material, History of Child Guidance, Hungarian influence upon psychoanalysis in Australia

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And so Clara Geroe’s personal library landed in my storage unit. Her son’s family home is being cleared for sale in due course. He kept everything and now all is on its way to a new home. Some of it was distributed to her patients by Clara’s husband, Willi, after her death. He invited each to choose a book as a memento.

Libraries are personal collections of a life: books are connected with moments, an outcome of a small story that resulted in the decision to purchase, or borrow, a book. They are clues to a conversation, or a private moment. It is amazing to learn that Clara seems to have liked detective fiction. Or that she had an eye for political cartoons – at least she did when she visited Britain in 1961. There is a collection of books focussing on events during the holocaust – including an English edition of George Faludi, a Hungarian poet and essayist’s account of his experiences during the war years. In Australia, a thoughtful purchase made during her holiday in Queensland, was Arthur Groom’s 1949 One mountain after another – a travel book, perhaps, but also a commentary on settler’s role in indigenous dispossession, and the environment.

Clara’s professional books date from the early 1920s when she was doing her medical training. And so we find a handbook on medicines and mixes in Hungarian. She was interested in psychosomatics, was a student of Pal Ranschberg and contributed a paper to the neurology section of Ranschberg’s Fetschrift: Psychologische Beobachtungen bei Hyperventilationsversuchen an Epileptiken : Psychological observations on hyperventilation experiments on epileptics ( Google translate). Leopold Szondi was also a contributor to this section with a paper: Uber die klinische und pathogenetische Zweiteilung der Neurasthenie – in English, About the clinical and pathogenic division of of neurasthenia. It is worth noting that by 1928 when the Fetschrift was held, Clara was undertaking her psychoanalytic training. That three of the four sections of the Fetschrift focussed on Modern experimental psychology, Child psychology and pedagogy, and child psychotherapy, show that this arena of psychology was well developed when she decided to focus on child analysis and pedagogy during the 1930s. She brought her collection of Hungarian journals in this field with her to Australia in 1940, anticipating that she would develop this area of practice.

Scattered through the collection along with articles in Hungarian – including papers gifted to Szondi and to herself – how did she come by Szondi’s copy? – are various psychoanalytic journals from the 1940s. Possibly they landed on her book case and stayed for ever: The British Journal of Medical Psychology and The International Review of Psychoanalysis, among them. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s publication: on Children and War – in German. And of course Sandler’s final publication of the child psychology indexing committee. Some publications by Freud: Moses and Monotheism, and another of his selected essays, gifted by Kata Lev,y are also there. Towards the end of her life, she seems to have become interested in feminist literature although these books are not signed as being hers. Then there is Bowlby, Melanie Klein, Klein and Riviere, Bettelheim, and even Russian text – in English – on Pavlovian Psychology published in 1950. This is an important book for our understanding of the Stalinization of psychology in Hungary as well as the USSR. And more… Clara was interested in socialist thought. She was also intrigued by anthropology.

A most interesting item among all of this is the 1935 copy of the International Psychoanalytic Association Membership list. There are no representatives from Australia in the British section although Mary Barkas, from New Zealand, who became an Associate in 1923, is listed. Roy Coupland Winn from Sydney was either about to become an Associate, or was too late for the listing. In the Hungarian section Clara Lazar ( she did not use her married name) is listed as a full member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society alongside 20 other full members – among them the Balints, the Levys, Vilma Kovacs, Hermann, Hollos, Almasy, Geza Roheim. Two Associates, Edit Gyomeroi and Maria Kircz-Takasz are listed. Endre Peto who emigrated to Australia in 1949, and Erszebet Kardos are absent… perhaps they were still in training.

These books are the relicts of a life, indicative of the complexity for a biographer – neither to rehabilitate nor damn, but to understand how a person represented herself to herself and others, within the realm of her particular social unconscious. 







					


	





	

								
How Kalgoorlie Gold Miners Began Learning About Psychoanalysis
										

			19
			Tuesday
			Aug 2014
		

	
	

		

			Posted  by  in 1920s, historical source material, western australia		

		

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One of the reasons for starting this blog was an interest in exploring the influence of psychoanalytic ideas in this part of the world: Australia and the Oceania region. The advent of the National Library of Australia’s data base, TROVE, and the link to Australia’s digitized newspaper collection has enabled an ease of research by laptop rather than making the physical journey to spend hours trawling through ancient newspapers. How this might shape the way history is developed and written will be interesting to see.


In the 1910s and 1920s – the interwar years – in the sprawling country that was settler Australia, with so many people living a long way from anywhere that resembled a city, interest in culture, whether politics, literature, science and philosophy could be hardly restricted to metropolitan newspapers and readers. Regional and local newspapers, depending upon the interests of their editors and readers, reported widely on literary and scientific events and thinking. Local papers generally confined reportage to political, economic and local news with a serial thrown in. With contributions from people with particular expertise, newspapers across the country reflect the diverse interests amongst Australian people. Freud’s name was well enough known by 1938 that the process of his escape from Europe was reported on a daily basis in numerous local papers across the country as well as in the metropolitan and regional press.  So too was his death a year later. So what is the result when ‘Psychoanalysis’ is typed into the search engine.


A little research was needed. Using the word ‘psychoanalysis’ as my tool, I undertook a little survey of the TROVE digitized newspaper site. I used the year dates: from 1920 to 1929. In this period 1126 ‘articles’ were found from a total of 769 digitized newspapers. The total number of articles concerning psychoanalysis for the entire archive, dating from 1803 to 2007, is 2941. Other words could be used, such as ‘Freud’,  ‘Psychotherapy’, ‘Psychology’ and ‘Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy’ and may yield different articles which will add to the store of items available.  The point here, though, is that during the early part of the twentieth century news of Freud and his work, transmitted through the print media, reached a far into remote Australia as well as finding a more likely audiences living in the metropolitan areas.  


Now, to content. Inevitably some writers will be critical of psychoanalysis and its method; others, admiring of Freud and his work wish to recommend it . There was also reportage of lectures and educational events: Workers Educational Association lectures were a major forum for lectures about psychoanalysis. From 1923 a new venture, the formation of the Australian Society for Psychology and Philosophy by University of Sydney’s  Professor Sir Francis Anderson began attracting interested and critical readers – also from places hundreds of miles from Sydney.  Between August 1923 and March 1924 the Capricornian a weekly newspaper in Rockhampton, a town in Northern Queensland, published four items of over 1000 words centred upon the introduction of the Association’s new journal, The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. and within this, exploring responses to the new science of psychoanalysis. Not so the the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miner’s Advocate, a regional paper serving Newcastle, north of Sydney. Nevertheless who, from the perspective of early twenty-first century urban Australia, would guess that at this time in the early 1920s, that in a place as remote and as rugged as the ‘frontier’ mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, that the topic of psychoanalysis would have even rated a mention?


 Kalgoorlie, some 370 miles from Perth, was begun as a miner’s camp in 1893 when gold was discovered. It was declared as a town in 1895. It was and remains small enough population-wise. Wikipedia, that ever reliable source, suggests that Kalgoorlie’s population was about 2000 by 1899, increasing to 6000 by 1903, or so. Census data from the 2011 collection show Kalgoorlie’s population to be 13,949. This little film compiled from photographs at Western Australia’s State Library with commentary by Don Pugh, is a glimpse into the conditions in which the early settlers were living.




Perhaps it is reflective of the randomness and the sporadic way in which psychoanalytic ideas were spread globally. Or perhaps it shows how dispersed the population was as well as the reliance of many people upon the written word for information about the world about them. In the 1920s newspapers were the main form of mass communication, if not for many people, the only form.  Fortune seekers on the Kalgoorlie goldfields may also have been medical practitioners or lawyers or indeed, Oxford Dons before going off to try their luck.


 Between 1920 and 1929 Kalgoorlie’s daily, the Kalgoorlie Miner, published twenty articles where psychoanalysis was a key work, if not subject. In contrast with the  metropolitan papers, The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Argus  which published 65 and 46 items, this is a surprisingly high number.  South Australian daily, Adelaide’s  Advertiser published 92 items during the same period while Perth’s two papers, the West Australian and the Western Mail published 90 items between them during the same period. One would expect more articles on the subject to have been published in the larger metropolitan areas of Sydney and Melbourne, both, at one time, Australian government centres.


The material is not lightweight. On 1 February 1921 readers of the Kalgoorlie Miner found this little item headed, “What Psychoanalysis is Doing”. Here is the full text.


 Since Freud began his searching and patient investigation of the unconscious mind, over twenty five years ago, a constantly increasing number of psychologists, mental physicians, and educational reformers have found it necessary to reconsider a number of problems associated with the conscious activity of the mind in health and disease.


 It is not too much to say that psycho-analysis has revealed the springs of human behaviour in an entirely new light, and that its discoveries are of an epoch-making character. The practical results are indisputable in the cure of hysterical affections and those mental and physical symptoms that have been classed loosely under the description ‘neurasthenia.’ 


Psycho-analysis, as practised by ardent and highly-qualified physicians in military and civil hospitals during the war, relieved a very large number of sufferers from states of morbid dread, acute mental depression, loss of memory, and obsessional ideas. The treatment provides a means for which physicians have sought for generations, and the proof of its efficacy is shown to-day by the host of people who have been released from some of the keenest emotional torture experienced by humanity. 


At a period in civilisation when the difficulty of adjustment to conditions that conflict with deep primal instincts induces an enormous amount of nervous and mental disturbance, psycho-analysis brings a healing boon to mankind. The menace to mental sanity, and frequently the physical health, is not invariably present in the consciousness. It was through an analysis of a patient’s unconscious mind, as revealed in dreams, that Freud, became deeply impressed by the part that the unconscious plays in the causation of hysteria, abnormal fears, and impulsions of a morbid character.  


Psycho-analysis, as Dr. H. Coriot says, ‘bears the same relation in all its principles to the human mind, and to social consciousness, as bio logy does to the organic world.’ Many difficult social and moral questions become plainer through a knowledge of the unconscious mind. Psycho-analysis supplies an explanation for forgetfulness, slips of the, tongue and the pen, and many of our puzzling weaknesses and strange deep-rooted prejudices. It is not possible to describe the technique of the system in a few words. The cure of mental illness comes through ‘transference, a  feeling of acknowledged sympathy towards the physician such as is noted in all medical practice when the patient relies on the wisdom or the doctor. This is not ‘falling in love with the doctor.’ as suggested by some critics. Any demonstration of that kind would put an end to the treatment. I recommend interested persons to read ‘What is Psycho-analysis?’ by Dr. Coriot; ‘The Freudian Wish’ by Holt; and ‘Man’s Unconscious Conflict,’ by Dr. Lay.


Perhaps it should not be so surprising that such interest and vigorous thinking about intellectual and cultural issues is so easily demonstrable at this time in Australian history. Or probably anywhere for that matter. But Australia at this time had just dried the ink on its own constitution signed in 1901. It was leading the world in some political and social spheres. White women had gained the right to vote, beginning in 1895 in South Australia with New South Wales Women achieving this in 1908, well ahead of the United Kingdom where women’s suffrage was not achieved until the late  1920s. It’s welfare reforms, particularly in the field of state children, were well regarded. From the late nineteenth century, in several states the ‘boarding out’ of state children was internationally recognized as the ‘Australian System’. In 1916 workers in Victoria had won a long and hard battle, commenced in 1856, for the 8 hour working day: 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep and 8 hours leisure and would be achieved nationally during the 1920s. Some interesting research is yet to be done.


 


References:-


1921 ‘WHAT PSYCHO-ANALYSIS IS DOING.’, Kalgoorlie Miner (WA : 1895 – 1950), 1 February, p. 3, viewed 19 August, 2014, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article92883739


Edwin B Holt (1915) , The Freudian wish and its place in ethics, New York, Henry Holt and Company. https://archive.org/stream/freudianwishitsp00holtiala#page/n1/mode/2up  (accessed 18 August 2014).


Wilfrid Lay (1917), Man’s unconscious conflict: a popular exposition of psychoanalyis, New York, Dodd, Mead and Company; https://archive.org/stream/mansunconsciousc00laywiala#page/n5/mode/2up (accessed 18 August 2014)


 



 

					


	






	

								
Psychoanalysis and Northern Queensland -1925
										

			07
			Sunday
			Oct 2012
		

	
	

		

			Posted  by  in 1920s, Conferences and Lectures, historical source material, New Psychology, Newspaper reportage, Press, public education, Queensland, settler culture		

		

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I found this item in the Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, Queensland.


The date: 21 August 1925.


Professor Scott-FIetcher, from the University of Queensland, delivered a public lecture in tho Mount Morgan Technical College on Wednesday night on “Recent Developments of Psychology.” The chair was occupied by the Mayor of Mt. Morgan (Alderman A, P. Bedsor).


Mount Morgan is a town located in central Queensland, Australia. It is situated on the Dee River, 38 kilometres south of the city of Rockhampton, and is 680 kilometres north of the state capital, Brisbane. It is far enough away, one presumes – from a twenty-first century perspective – for the newly emerging disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis to be of little interest to people. Yet the National Library’s digitized newspaper collection, enabling an easy and closer look at the material at hand, reveals quite the opposite. From the 1920s Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin frequently published items about psychoanalysis – in favour and not. Along with the Barrier Hill Miner in Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie‘s daily newspaper along with those of the state capital cities, it is possible to see that there was widespread and lively interest in this ‘New Psychology’ as it was called, from the early decades of the twentieth century.


Let us listen to the reporter’s account of Professor Scott-Fletcher’s address. He clearly enjoyed it.


“In the course of a very fine address, the lecturer said that psychology was the science which investigated all mental states, normal end abnormal Some years ago the subject was mainly studied as an introduction to philosophy but during this century psychology had made great advances as an independent science. Moat universities had a laboratory, in which, by means of experiments, it was possible to test general intelligence, memory, and perceptual ability. The study of the mental equipment of animals had shown that instinct in human beings was one of the main factors in behaviour. The professor then described how the discovery of the unconscious mental processes in man had opened up an immense field of research. The application of these results to education, mental disorders, and even business efficiency had been attended with great success.”


“The use of psychoanalysis by Freud was next described. The lecturer explained that the undue prominence given to sex in this method had led to several new developments, in which Jung, Adler, and Bjerre had by other methods, successfully treated pathological cases due to mental maladaptation to environment. Psychology, while deterministic in theory, yet aimed in its practical applications nt securing freedom for the individual by making his actions self-determined.”


“At the close of the lecture the professor very lucidly answered a number of questions; asked by members of the audience. The lecture, was greatly appreciated by a good audience, and a hearty vote of thanks was accorded the lecturer”.


Professor Scott-Fletcher was New Zealand born and. according to his obituary published in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail on 7 November 1947, took his Master of Arts degree at Sydney University in 1902. He won the University Medal for Philosophy. He became the Master of King’s College at the University of Queensland in 1912 and, in 1916 was appointed to Wesley College at the University of Sydney where he also tutored on philosophy. He was appointed as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in 1922 and resigned in 1938. At the time of his death he was 79 years of age.


There may be, of course, more to learn about the Professor.   You can contact me via freudinoceania[at]gmail[dot]com  if you would like to add to this.

					


	





	

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

			03
			Wednesday
			Oct 2012
		

	
	

		

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

		

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


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


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


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


evidence in plenty and the backing of some of the greatest minds of our time, but as you read through the book you can safely forget all this and test everything said in the light of your own experience of yourself and others. I ask for nothing more than this.

McRae’s 10 session lecture series demonstrates that he had a grasp of the complexities of psychoanalytic theory of which dreams are a part. His focus on the ‘inferiority complex’ though reveals his Adlerian preference.  He began Foundations of Behaviour with a general introduction – ‘How We See Ourselves’. We may be able to gauge the personality of others, he began, but how do we understand what causes people to act as they do? He drew attention to possible meaning in psychosomatic symptoms; to the mystery behind a sudden onset of acute anxiety or depression, and ways to understand the ‘vicarious satisfactions’ wrought through ‘stealing, delinquency, procrastination or antisocial behaviour for which we are ashamed, sicknesses behind which we hide, then we may not feel too happy about getting knowledge concerning our real motives, for then we may have to change our way of life and this is not easy or pleasant, especially when we have behaved one way for so long’.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

					


	





	

								
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS: A Doctor’s Warning – 1924
										

			08
			Saturday
			Sep 2012
		

	
	

		

			Posted  by  in 1920s, Australian History, Conferences and Lectures, historical source material, Lay analysis, Medical circles, NSW, Press, Public debate, Sydney		

		

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By the early 1920s public interest in psychoanalysis in Australia was broad, and certainly not restricted to medical circles. The president of the Victorian branch of the British Medical Association, Dr L.S. Latham used his retiring speech to warn that psychoanalysis should not be utilised indiscriminately. At the very least, he argued,  psychoanalysis should be practised ‘under skilled medical direction’. It is clear that there was sufficient interest for the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald  to publish Latham’s speech in the edition of 1 January 1924. Here is the text:


“The widespread and general interest in psycho-analysis is to be viewed with some concern. I am anxious not to indulge in cheap criticism, but it may be pointed out (what should be clear to anyone who has practised with any concentration psycho- logical method of introspection) that there are many pitfalls to be avoided in a logical tracing out of psychological associations. Follow a train of thought in your own mind and the associations are frequently most difficult to connect. The ideas would appear to be associated in time, but in little else.


Psycho-analysis affords by the “word association tests” a valuable means of examination of mind and determining the lines along which association tends to occur, but recognition of the occasional value of this method is consistent with the view that it should be but rarely applied, and that the Freudian symbolic interpretation of many phenomena thus observed need not be endorsed. The efforts of ancient philologists In derivations such as faba, fabaricus (fab-aricot-us) (h) aricot, and mus muris (mu-rat-us) rat, are ingenuous and simple in comparison with some of the psycho-analytic symbolisms.


Probably the whole profession makes use from time to time of suggestion, and many of our patients need above all things inspiration or, it may be, comfort, and these constitute a form of psycho-therapy.


It should be strongly emphasised that In cases of nervous disease psycho-analytic methods should not be employed by non-medical exponents alone, even though they may be expert psychologists, for it is necessary before application of such methods that the presence of organic disease liable to be aggravated by the employment of such methods be first excluded. Such conditions aro encephalitis and other inflam- matory states. Of course, the ideal method would be that persons suitable for this method of investigation should be handled by an expert psychologist in association with skilled medical direction”.


 


 

					


	





	

								
Inner Worlds: Portraits and Psychology – 2012
										

			02
			Monday
			Jan 2012
		

	
	

		

			Posted  by  in Exhibitions, historical source material		

		

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Between 18 April and 22 July this year the National Portrait Gallery‘s travelling exhibition Inner Worlds: Portraits and Psychology will be held at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne. It is accompanied by a marvellous website, developed for its first exhibition last year.  Recordings of talks by several of the curators and a panel discussion which includes Sydney based psychoanalysts, Reg Hook and John McLean as well as Deborah McIntyre, formerly from Melbourne but now living and working in Canberra provides rounded commentary on the multiple lenses through which these portraits can be viewed.  A portrait – and discussion with David Chalmers, renowned world-wide for his work on the philosophy of consciousness is also included, much to my delight. His edited text Philosophy of Mind formed the basis of a profoundly interesting, to me at least, online course on the philosophy of mind through Oxford University. Chalmers also has his own website which I urge you to explore, here.


Inner Worlds links portraiture with psychoanalysis in Australia during the twentieth century. It brings together portraits of the early psychologists and psychoanalysts to emerge in this country as well as work by artists who, responding to the ‘New Psychology’ became interested in the relationship between art, psychology, the unconscious and ‘intense mental states’. Much of this was undertaken between the two world wars of the twentieth centuryas experiences of war, trauma and the use of psychology in the treatment of those people who were severely traumatised by these experiences were becoming clearer. For this reason some of the ‘pioneers’ selected for this exhibition were from the medical field. John William Springthorpe and Paul Dane were Melbourne medical practitioners who enlisted during WW1. Their work and interest in psychoanalysis  followed that of British – and German – colleagues who learned in the field that the ‘talking cure’ helped soldiers who were deeply traumatized by a battlefield like no other in human history. Indeed trauma, war neurosis, and hysterical paralysis were the significant subjects for inclusion in the British Medical Journal during these years.  Another war veteran, Roy Coupland Winn, originally from Newcastle in New South Wales, and the son of the owner of Winn’s Emporium in that town, became the first Australian psychoanalyst to begin private practice – in Sydney.


Credit does need to be given to Melbourne based historian Joy Damousi for her excavation of this arena. Her research, published in her 2005 book, Freud in the Antipodes,  informs this exhibition – although those who are designated pioneers are as interesting as those who are omitted. Psychologist and Educator, Tasman Lovell, appointed Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney in 1929 is  generally credited with developing the first separate department of psychology in Australia in 1939. Not included is his  counterpart, Philip Le Couteur, appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at the newly opened University of Western Australia in 1913. Both were appointed in the war years during which they developed  courses in experimental psychology and which included  psychoanalysis by 1918. Australia was a small place then. Psychology was presented as a branch of philosophy.  Le Couteur did not stay in Western Australia, however. Family concerns in the eastern states resulted in his decision to resign his post and move to Melbourne where he took up the headmastership of Methodist Ladies College by the end of 1918.


Representing the clergy is  Ernest Burgmann, appointed the Anglican Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn in 1934. Generally credited for his social activism, as Damousi notes, Burgmann sought to marry this with his religious committment. His interest in psychoanalysis appears to have begun in the 1920s when he attended Tasman Lovell’s lectures at the University of Sydney. By 1929 he was writing of its applicability to disciplines – anthropology, criminology, education, theology, economics and literature. It is hard to guage on the amount of evidence provided whether Burgmann’s interest was a consequence of his own particular questing mind. He appears to have been a person of many interests. Nevertheless Burgmann, the theologian and clergyman was not alone in his appreciation of the usefulness of psychoanalytic thinking in this line of work. He was not necessarily a pioneer, though. In 1923 Congregational minister Nicholas Cocks  had written at length about  the congruence between the psychoanalytic process and the theologians work in an article published the second edition of the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. Unfortunately Cocks died suddenly in 1925 – too early, really. Perhaps there are other contenders for the pioneering label. There is till much more to explore in the Australian field.


Of course the early psychoanalysts are central to this exhibition which includes portraits of Clara Geroe, the first training analyst in Australia by Judy Cassab.


Clara Lazar Geroe together with her husband and child and her colleague, Andrew Peto with his wife, arrived from Europe and Nazi persecution during 1940 – after protracted lobbying from British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. He had also had ensured Freud was released from Germany – despite the reluctance of the British Government to act on the refugee issue.  Instrumental for her acceptance as an emigrant was the advocacy of the Australian psychiatrists Paul Dane, Reg Ellery, Coupland Winn, along with the clergy through Bishop Burgmann, and  head of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sir Charles Moses. This group had taken  their case to the Australian Department of Interior. Geroe, a trained analyst and member of the The Budapest Psychoanalytical Society, subsequently became Australia’s first Training Analyst  and a founding member of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society in Melbourne.




Dr Clara Geroe – by Judy Cassab


In 1982, Geroe’s interview with by researcher, Douglas Kirsner was published in the Melbourne  journal, Meanjin, then under the editorship of Judith Brett in September 1982. Here Geroe related that her first contact with psychoanalysis occurred when she was taken by her older sisters to a talk given by psychoanalyst Salvador Ferenczi a doctor in the hussar regiment garrisoned in her home-town in Hungary during WW1. His book on psychoanalysis, available in the local bookshop, was purchased by her parents. She told Kirsner,


I secretly pinched it, read it and said, ‘Oh. This is what I want to do’. I was then in the middle of my high school years and I somehow knew I must not study it yet or I would never go through with my planned medical studies.


Geroe successfully completed her studies and became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Society.  But by the mid 1930s it was clear that the Jews were under considerable pressure to evacuate Europe.It was becoming clear to Jewish people that Hitler’s regime was no longer willing to tolerate their presence. At the International Psychoanalytic Conference in Paris during 1938 Geroe began exploring the possibility of herself, and five other analysts migrating to New Zealand.  However few countries, including New Zealand and Australia, were willing to consider, if at all, taking refugees beyond quotas established in the 1920s. The Evian Conference called by US President Roosevelt had done little to change this. The New Zealand government refused the applications of all six. In Australia Geroe was accepted because, she reckoned, she had a child. It is not clear whether Andrew Peto was one of the six. Refugees were not welcome anywhere, it seems.


From her arrival in late 1940 Geroe was was a central figure in the development of the field and the training of psychoanalysts in Australia. She was instrumental in the beginning of Melbourne’s Children’s Court Clinic and the Koorong School run by Janet and Clive Neild in Melbourne. Western Australian born psychoanalyst  Ivy Bennett who practised in Perth during the 1950s remembered the warmth of Geroe’s welcome and her encouragement – ‘before the Graham controversies’ began in the late 1950s – perhaps an allusion to the nascent Kleinian influence which in the 1960s. Andrew Peto did not fare as well. After some years battling the authorities over his qualifications he left Australia for New York where he established his practice and gained recognition. Indeed a little internet search finds him as having delivered the 1978 Brill Memorial Lecture on the subject: Rondanini Pieta: Michelangelo’s Infantile Neurosis’.


In his 2002 book, The Hitler Emigres, a study of the contribution of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany on British culture, historian Daniel Snowman notes that Jewish people were denied entry to a number of the professions. Instead many gained their education in the  arts – literature, music, art – deeply educated in these fields.  Geroe told Kirsner in 1982:


It is hardly necessary to say that members of the Society were all extremely cultured. Analysis was a cultural and vocational interest and not very lucrative. You had to be a bit of a revolutionary to become interested, to think for yourself and not be with the establishment. Amongst ourselves there was no distinction between medical and non medical people, and nowhere were women treated  more equally than in analytic circles. I became very interested in child analysis and worked with Alice Balint in a children’s clinic. Unfortunately it was closed down when the Nazis came. Child analysis was beginning; Melanie Klein had begun working and Anna Freud had written her first book. We had very intimate contact withj Anna Freud and her group; child analysts met weekly in Budapest and Vienna and we would sometimes go on an exchange seminar to Vienna for the weekend.


During the 1940s,  the work of these analysts, developments in training and clinical experience,  reached the consciousness of artists such as Joy Hester and  Albert Tucker. 


(Joy Hester – 1945: Frightened Woman).


Both artists responded to the traumas of war – representing the internal agony experienced by many returned soldier, prisoners of war and holocaust survivors – men and women in their art work. Some of Tucker’s series, Images of Modern Evil is captured here.


This exhibition  is about ‘sight and insight’ –  It is about looking and beginning to see and to think about what might be happening in the minds of oneself and another beneath the surface appearances. it is about learning that intense emotional experiences and mental states can be thought about, talked about in a number of ways: though words, painting music and other forms. Perhaps it is also a plea for the value of the humanities and culture – so often decried these days in the academy – but which in themselves are about the attempt to understand human experience.


The advent of the the National Library’s online digitised newspapers collection enables this historical record to be easily mined – and the discovery that there was widespread interest in this field beyond  cities, intellectual elite and artists – in places as far afield, and remote, as  were Rockhampton and Cairns in far North Queensland, Broken Hill in far west New South Wales and Kalgoorlie a gold mining town in Western Australia. That said, a search through the newspapers of all the major capital cities may well have yielded results for the historian  Joy Damousi, whose book Freud in the Antipodes has also structured this exhibition.  I would have liked to see a more representative group of pioneers – from across the country –  whose advocacy for understanding the inner world did not find its time. That Bill McCrae sought the support of the British Medical Association in an attempt to establish a psychoanalytic institute at the University of Western Australia in 1943 is missed; that  several very talented  women – including Ivy Bennett and Ruth Thomas, both from that state, found their way to London and psychoanalytic training with Anna Freud’s group has also been missed. Thomas ane Bennett had in common their experience with the educationalist Professor Robert Cameron at the University of Western Australia during the 1930s and 1940s.


Of course one cannot have everything. It is enough to know that with this exhibition which is touring Australia during the next couple of years, has opened the door to an essential moment in Australian cultural history.







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The Meaning of Fairyland
										

			20
			Sunday
			Nov 2011
		

	
	

		

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Look at them, troll mother said. Look at my so...
Mother Trolls: Image via Wikipedia








There is very little information about New Zealander, Jean Mather, author of the article, ‘The Unconscious Meaning of Fairyland’ published n two parts in the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. At this time she was an Associate of the Department of Psychology at Wellington University.  She appears been a kindergarten teacher during the 1920s. Newspaper items refer to her interest in fairy stories. She constructed little plays for children to perform. In this article she took on a mammoth task: to  examine the meaning of   European myths – fairy stories – and their relationship with the developing mind of the child.


Here, I will trace  the main thread of Mather’s articles, as she deftly links internal unconscious processes with their collective expression in myths and legends. Mather  is respectful of Freud but like Jung and Adler disputes his thesis that childhood sexuality is at the centre of development. Noting  Freud’s recognition of the ‘remarkable similarity which exists between the myths of primitive man and the dreams and phantasies of civilised persons’. ( Mather 1933: I), Mather used the  work of two of Freud’s former associates Jung and Adler. Both were unconvinced by Freud’s theories of childhood sexuality. While this had been worked out by members of Freud’s Wednesday group -Abraham (Dream and Myth), Otto Rank ( The Myth and the Birth of the Hero) and Riklin ( Wish Fulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales), Mather preferred Adler’s notions of the ‘inferior personality’ and Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypal psychology to frame her understanding of children’s development. The meaning of fairytales is intertwined with psychic development.


Understanding ‘Fairyland’ to be a metaphor for psychic processes, Mather begins by describing it as a retreat, against growth and the development of independence.  Always Fairyland is  portrayed as a beautiful and  enchanted place where miracles occur, she says. It is paradise and it is also the land of the dead. On may visit but should a mortal eat the magic food is eaten by a mortal ‘he usually becomes captive in the enchanted land and can never return home’.  Mather cites Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem,  ‘Passing of Arthur’  describing the place to which Arthur, seriously wounded, intends to make the journey…to the


.…..island valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or wind or snow,Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows, crowned with summer seas.


Fairyland is usually reached across valleys, over rivers or through climbing a mountain. Often it is reached by passing through a secret door, perhaps a hole in the ground. There is no restriction on time, Mather continues. Time does not exist. A day may be a thousand years. ‘The dead sleep on, heedless of the flight of ages’. Fairyland is a retreat to a place before conflict and difficulties began; it is a place where all wishes are fulfilled. She continues:


‘Fairies are not the spirits of the dead, but of the living, being personified projections of our own thoughts and feelings. In fact it is this dual character ( about life and death) that gives real clue to its deepest significance’.


Interestingly Mather omits the final line from Tennyson’s verse: ‘Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. Arthur,wounded in battle against physicalenemies and by the psychological projections, jealousies and rivalries of others, seeks retreat, hoping to heal and repair his wounds.


Death and renewal are constant themes in European myths and legends.One of the most universal: that of the sun-god setting in the west, dying in the west to be renewed and reborn in the eastern skies  in the morning. Easter celebrates the cycle of the death and the resurrection in biblical terms; the death of winter and the renewal that comes with spring. Mather wrote:


The sun every evening is immersed in the maternal water, often being threatened by dangers of all kinds, and is born again renewed in the morning. In many cases as, for example, the myth of Osiris, the hero is enclosed in a chest or ark for his journey across the sea; an inversion of the natural fact that the child floats in the amniotic fluid and that this is in the uterus. The chest or box here is a symbol of the mother’s womb, as is the monster by which the hero is swallowed.






Meadow Elves








 


In Fairyland time passes in a flash. The return to reality is marked, often, by recognition that life has gone by without one, that one has long been forgotten. Sometimes the voyager is able to restore he life on earth. Often he crumbles away to nothing after eating mortal food.  It is the end of omnipotence, maybe? In therapy or analysis the wish to ‘begin all over again’, may refer to a place before it all began, to a desire to return to the womb.For Mather this is not about  fears of incest – a view derived from a Freudian perspective but concerns the real love for the parents by the child which does not have sexual connotations in Mather’s view, until the child begins to mature. More particularly  it is 


‘some difficulty or conflict of the present moment, and that, in seeking the cause in the distant past, one is following the desire of the individual to withdraw himself as far as possible from his present perplexity or his present task


The outcome here, a regressive move, causes re-animation of childish adaptations with the result that


Elaborate dreams and phantasies are then produced, as forms of compensation for the unfulfill ed adaptation to reality’ but their sexual content is only apparently expressive of an incest wish, being a regressive employment of sexual forms to express a need in a symbolical way.


These articles give a good analysis of the ways a troubled person may seek to cope – to withdraw into an underground world where nothing touches one – it is believed. It is linked with the growth from infant time when all wishes were satisfied to the present where frustrations and obstacles are part of everyday living.It is the result of conflict… not creativity – a wish to return to the state  ‘before’ rather than ”after’ or ‘now’.


The extraverts that Jung writes of may see the world as a positive place. They have not suffered serious setback while the ‘introvert’ feels the world to be a dangerous place. These are the people who may wander into ‘fairyland’ where they hope that the work of redemption might be done.  But tragically for many, the return to the mortal world comes far too late. Time has passed; friends and associates have moved on. One may be left behind. The taste of mortal food breaks the spell. The “child” falls down dead.


Or is it childish phantasy that dies? Does this symbolise the breakdown we have already had – the event that caused the retreat in the first place? It appears that Mather turns to the earliest days of infant life and the relationship between infant and mother when she writes:


It is not surprising that in fairy tales those who are stolen away by the fairies or who wander into fairyland are…persons in whom definite feelings of inferiority may be assumed to exist. It is extremely significant that there should be a widespread superstition that newborns must be protected against the perils of their condition but also against fairies and other supernatural beings which are always on the watch to seize and carry them off if they are left unguarded, leaving in their place one of the fairy folk, or a block of wood made to resemble the stolen child.


One wonders whether these fairy stories are, in fact, describing the plight and response of an abandoned child, a child where bonding between mother and child is broken down.


But the seeking of treasure and reward in fairyland is to seek a worthless solution. ‘It is the treasure of phantasy and dream, Mather writes. It is ‘very precious to the regressive element in man’s nature. but worthless rubbish to the progressive, onward looking aspect of the libido’. It is a bondage that must be overcome – and can only be done by rebellion against the conditions set forth for life in paradise.


It is only by the doing of “evil” that a knowledge of good and evil can be attained, and the primary unmorality and thoughtless irresponsibility of childhood can be destroyed. The “War With Evil” enters in to disrupt the original harmony of life and one’s actions must be no longer instinctive, but the result of conscious deliberation and choice.


We all yearn for fairyland, it seems. We yearn for the golden days of childhood innocence and freedom from responsibility. We have an awareness of ‘paradise lost’ and seek the indulgence reserved for children.  The voyage to fairyland is the opportunity to rework old conflicts and to re-emerge afresh having resisted the temptation to eat the ‘magic food’ of the immortals and thus stay in the magic world of unreality – forever.


With multiple examples drawn from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Andrew Lang’s collection in his Fairy Books, among others, Mather traces variations in fairy stories to illustrate her point. Fairy stories are not just an expression of internal conflict she concludes, but embody a process of working things out at a deeply unconscious level. All of us have out own personal project: to relinquish the shackles of childhood paradise and to make our way in the world.


Jean Mather, MA, ‘The Unconscious Significance of Fairyland’, in Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol 11, Issue 4, December 1933, pages 258-274; AND: Volume 12, Issue 1, March 1934, pages 16-32.

					


	





	

								
Treating Shell Shock. Ethel Mortimer Langdon, ‘In the Mental Workshop – Reflections on Modern Psychopathy’ – 1922
										

			19
			Friday
			Aug 2011
		

	
	

		

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From time to time one stumbles across a piece of writing, a lecture, a work or object that unclouds another lens into our vision of times gone-by. Until recently I had never heard of Ethel Mortimer Langdon, nor of Sydney’s Women’s Club which was quite active in the first decades of the twentieth century. For that I have to express gratitude to the souls beavering away at the National Library to build its web-site ‘Trove’. The newspaper collection is getting larger by the minute. The search engine is easy to navigate and the online press-clipping service that results is well ordered. Typing the word ‘psychoanalysis’ into the search engine then trawling through the findings one by one was enough to do it.


I retrieved an account of Ethel Langdon’s lecture from the newspapers and from thence  went to the National Library catalogue to find the published copy. It is a little rambling. She appears to have padded  it out. She repeated herself, often. But what she has to say about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as a new form of treatment for anyone – including herself – is clear and important, as people began contemplating its  development in the post war years. Her lecture and her audience put paid to the notion that in the early 1920s knowledge and interest in psychoanalysis was the province of an  exclusive club of doctors, a few lay personages and the avant-garde. It appears that people were beginning to think about the unconscious, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as an option for their own mental distress.


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In the Mental Workshop is the published version of a lecture given by Ethel Mortimer Langdon to the Women’s Club in  Sydney on 5 April 1921. Langdon’s interests covered migration and resettlement and, together with her husband, she was connected with the formation of the Returned Soldiers League ( RSL). While residing in Ireland she was involved with Dublin’s Public Health System,   Housing, Child Welfare and the development of the British Mental Deficiency Bill and its extension to Ireland by the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland. Langdon had had her own troubles and breakdown, and appears to have received treatment in the United States. There is more to learn about this woman and her activities.


There is little information about the Women’s Club other than that gleaned from the online press. It appears to have been founded in about 1900, drawing together professional and educated women actively interested in social and political reform. Members met for lectures, educational events and socialising. By 1922 its membership was about 200.It is not surprising that members of the Women’s Club were interested in psychoanalysis. Knowledge of Freud’s work had reached Australia by 1911 when a group of interested folk  in Sydney began to read his work. Freud himself had sent a letter of encouragement, urging that his work spread to all parts of the world.


After the war ended in 1918 people began talking about their feeling that the world they had known before the war was lost, that Armageddon had been upon them, that the task now was to develop a new order.  What was to happen next was anyone’s guess as the European world watched their political leaders mete out a brutal punishment to Germany at Versailles and the League of Nations formed. In Melbourne, Mr Fitchett, the editor of the religious paper, The Southern Cross, predicted the Soviet Regime in Russia would be the new enemy. The Great War’s killing machines had devastated and shattered the bodies and souls of the men who returned home. During the years of fighting, and afte,r German, British and Allied soldiers alike presented doctors with a new syndrome – hysterical conversion reaction, breakdown, shell-shock, war neurosis –  paralysis of  mind. Doctors on both sides began to throw out Freud’s theory that psychosexuality was central to development. Trauma could be treated by analysis, dream interpretation hypnosis – and catharsis.


Ethel Langdon took up these matters in her lecture.  Firmly disassociating herself from spirituality, spiritism and the supernatural, she set out to elucidate   ‘the cause, cure and effect on present day life on diseases of the mind’. There was no magic; no smoke and mirrors in this. Psychoanalysis, she explained, had developed from Freud’s extension of ideas suggested to him during his time in France under the tutelage of Charcot. Langdon cited  psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, defining psychoanalysis as a ‘method which makes possible the analytic reduction of the psycho-contents to its simplest expression, and the discovery of the line of least resistance in the development of a harmonious personality’. In shell-shock,  she explained, the patient has not lost his senses, but has become jarred and out of harmony’. It symptoms were as varied as the people experiencing them including


‘loss of memory, insomnia, terrifying dreams, emotional instability, diminution of self-confidence and self-control, attacks of unconsciousness, or of changed consciousness sometimes accompanied by convulsive movement resembling epileptic fits, incapacity to understand even the smallest matters, obsessive thoughts, usually of the most gloomy and painful kind, in some cases, incipient delusions’.


The war had moved from the field into the interior of the mind. One might endure calmly face enormous dangers on the battlefield only to succumb to unconsciousness when one reached safety. Indeed it may well be that soldier and tank commander, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, was able to face enemy fire during the Great War, as he has related in his autobiography, The Long Weekend. In later years as he worked his way through memories of these times, he was ‘in hell’. Shock and disturbance was far more serious than it first appeared.


The main worry was wrong and insensitive treatment, Langdon stated There was need for careful assessment of the patient’s disposition, character and earlier personal experiences was essential – for the degree of shock and trauma was contingent on the mind experiencing it.


Langdon also argued that the discoveries and benefits from psychoanalytic treatment of people traumatized by war should be extended to the civilian population and impressed  upon her listeners the necessity to recognise  trauma and emotional distress as being states of disharmony with oneself – and treatable with psychotherapy.Amongst us there are many people who have some idiosyncrasy or who are not quite normal; to label these insane would be absurd, and so it would be an equal sin to call those who, owing to the war and their nerve drained condition, have been forced to abandon their work and who have to be re educated back to civilian life.She advocated treatment for children  ‘showing abnormal tendencies or retarded mental activity ‘when symptoms seem to have no hereditary connection with the parents….A child’s difficulty is generally caused chiefly by his inability to adjust himself to his environment and to adjust his environment to him’.


Langdon praised plans to establish a Chair of Psychiatry at Sydney University. It was essential. It would ensure scientifically proved standards of treatment were established and maintained rather than allowing charlatans and pretenders into the arena. The study of psychiatry, she stated, would ‘bring more knowledge of the wonders of prevention by means of diagnosis and re-education and cure of mind ailments by active scientific means, not just by detention and isolation, not only to the scientific but also to the lay mind.


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In 1923 Langdon’s published lecture reached the editor’s desk for the second edition of the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. A one sentence review dismissed it. Langdon said nothing new about the subject. For a Historian it is revealing comment. One might wonder whether the editor, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University, Sir Francis Anderson was being a little dismissive of a woman’s contribution. His marriage to feminist and activist Maybanke Anderson suggests otherwise. Langdon’s lecture held nothing new for his colleagues and him. As a marker of current thinking around war, shell shock,   psychotherapy and the potential contribution of psychoanalysis in the domestic sphere Langdon’s lecture is valuable source material.