Category Archives: Journals

Psychoanalysis Downunder #13 – a new website and a facebook page

27 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by in Journals, Psychoanalysis Downunder

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Since 2001 the Australian Psychoanalytical Society has been publishing the online journal ‘Psychoanalysis Downunder‘ dedicated to publishing articles, papers, book reviews and commentary by  psychoanalysts and others. It is offered free to the general community as a contribution to its intellectual life. One is able to read, and think, at one’s leisure.

The release of ‘Psychoanalysis Downunder # 13, under the editorship if Shahid Najeeb who has been doing the job for some years, co incides with a new and revamped website. The adventure implicit inhaving its own facebook page now provides another space for feedback and discussion. Will a Twitter account be next?

The existence of Psychoanalysis Downunder  reflects a long tradition of purveying and discussing Freud’s and others’ ideas. Psychoanalysis, as this blog also reflects, has long woven its way through Australian culture, in the cities and the bush since the first decade of the twentieth century when Dr Donald Fraser wrote to Freud about a reading group on psychoanalysis and, two years later was part of a group of medical practitioners who invited Freud and Jung to present at the Australasian Medical Congress. From then, as Joy Damousi sketched  out in her 2005 book, Freud in the Antipodes, psychoanalysis entered the fields of education, psychology, theology and philosophy. The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, first issued in 1923 under the editorship of Sir Francis Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, published articles about psychoanalysis and mental life. The journal was the organ of the Australasian Society of Psychology and Philosophy which had branches in the major capital cities in each Australian state as well as in regional  areas. It seems to have faded away after WW2, but the idea of enabling ideas to be transmitted across vast distances remains.

Australians have always had to manage distance. The network of regional papers and newservices across the country responded to people’s hunger for what was going on in other parts of the world but also kept them up to date with intellectual and social developments. More specifically,  during her visit to Australia in 1937, British psychoanalyst and educator, Susan Isaacs, not only was well received by city audiences but, to her delight because women in England did not do such broadcasts, was given the opportunity to broadcast her talks about child development through the radio so that country – rural and regional families – could also listen. It was an initiative of the Country Women’s Association in Queensland, and repeated in the southern states as the New Education Fellowship Conference, which hosted her visit made its way across the country, through Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth from 1 August 1937 to 20 Setpember 1937.

Here are the contents for edition # 13:

*John McClean ‘Basic Assumptions And The Training Analysis’

*Maurice Whelan: ‘The Space We Occupy and The Space Where Others Reside’

*Maurice Whelan: ‘Love of the World’

*Paul Schimmel : ‘Outside of Time’

*Shahid Najeeb: ‘In Praise of Fireflies’

*Shahid Najeeb: ‘Sand, Surf and Sky’

The journal also reflects some of the life within Australian psychoanalysis marking changes wrought, sadly, by the passing of colleagues.

*Gil Anaf:  “R S Gillen – Analyst in the frame.”    and

*Celia Pickworth:  “Ron Brookes – Remembering the Sydney “bush” psychoanalyst.”

And book reviews, of course, are form part of the project:

*Maurice Whelan:  Review of Paul Schimmel’s “Sigmund Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: Conquistador and Thinker.”

*Tom Wilmot: Review of Domenico Nesci’s “Multimedia Psychotherapy: A Psychodynamic approach for mourning in the technological age”

Psychoanalysis has made a considerable, but it seems, hidden  contribution to Australian culture and life.. and as you read through the journal over the years, it reflects something of the response of its authors and readers to the uniqueness of Australian conditions. Here are the links, this time not in text:

http://www.psychoanalysisdownunder.com.au/

https://www.facebook.com/psychoanalysisdownunder?fref=photo

A New Journal

17 Monday Jun 2013

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The first volume of the Australian Journal of Psychotherapy was published in 1982. It also marked the formation and formalisation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of Australia. It was, essentially, the first local ‘broad church’ – Australian-  journal on psychoanalytic theory and practice in the country. The Lacanian based ‘Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne’, was first published in 1979. Edited by a small group chaired by Melbourne Psychoanalyst Leonardo Rodriguez, the new Australian Journal of Psychotherapy contained seven papers and three book reviews, including member of the editorial committee Joan Christie’s piece on Janet Malcolm’s ‘Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession’.  In time, the journal has accepted and published contribution from psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, couple therapists and social theorists from Australia and internationally. Since then a few other periodicals have emerged: the quarterly Psychotherapy in Australia which began in 1994, and the online journal of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, Psychoanalysis Downunder which also began during the 1990s.

Developed by a team of passionately committed psychotherapists, most of whom were from Melbourne, it was hoped that the journal would become ‘a reading space for those interested in the developments of the talking cure and in reflections about the place of psychotherapy in the life of our culture. Founded on the same principles that made the therapeutic experience possible – to make the unconscious conscious… to be prepared to learn the truth… which nevertheless was not the private property of anyone, no matter how powerful’. Wise words. And so the journal was launched with a series of articles by several senior clinicians – on child and adolescent psychotherapy, on the technical issue of managing transference and countertransference in the consulting room and the formation of the human group. There was an article on linguistics and another on the ‘cultural vicissitudes of the human drives’.

In his preface to the journal Loren Borland, then President of the Psychotherapy Association of Australia, wrote briefly of the history of psychoanalytic thinking and practice in Australia and the formation.  It brought together a number of like-minded people and groups across Australia, Borland noted.They may have operated independently of one another but followed the same trajectory as to purpose and future direction. Borland also wrote of the early phases – people needed time to trust one another, to feel free to discuss theory and practice openly and without fear of destructive criticism. Thus a Federal structure had been created; one enabling groups from each state to retreat and shore up their identity before venturing out again into the national sphere. Large groups can be very exposing.

Borland hoped that in time the safety of the federal model would eventually disappear. There were many ‘beginnings’, Borland continued: the first conference at Bowral in New South Wales in 1981 where people began to trust and talk theory and practice together was one of them. New work was beginning: to develop ethical guidelines particular to the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy –  differentiated from the base professions: social work, psychology and psychiatry where psychotherapy was but a small part of their concerns. And of course, he added,  work was beginning to relate psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the broader mental health system.  And the journal? It was a place for discussion and reflection; where the status quo could be questioned, new concepts explored and ideas thrashed out in print. Moreover it was an Australian born psychoanalytic journal… with its own cultural base.