18 Saturday Jan 2014
Posted in lectures
The beginning. The meeting between Aaron Paterson and Lord John Alderdice, descendents of Australian explorer John King
(2) Lord John Alderdice
(3) Professor Marcia Langton
(4) Professor Ian Anderson
(5)Professor Stuart Twemlow
(6)Panel Discussion
05 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in History of Emotions, lectures, seminars
I happened across this lecture, ‘The Disappearance of Emotion? Violence, Affect, and the Post-Traumatic Subject’ to be given by Professor Ruth Leys at the University of Melbourne on Thursday 6 June 2013. It is free to the public and, indeed, more details can be found here. Briefly, Leys is examining the ‘latest twists’ in affect theory today. Her question is this:- Where Freud’s libido theory was central to twentieth century, will the twentyfirst be ‘the century of the “post-traumatic” subject, whose affective indifference and profound emotional disengagement from the world mark him or her as a victim of brain damage’?
Freud, his work and the development of psychoanalysis during the twentieth century, is under increasing and critical scrutiny by researchers in the Humanities and Cultural Studies field. The ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, a conglomerate formed by the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Western Australia focuses on the way people thought and felt in Europe from 1100 through to 1800 and from thence to the way these patterns found their expression and continued formation in Australia during the subsequent 200 years until the early twenty-first century. How psychoanalysis emerged both as a framework for interpretation of these phenomena AND as a method of investigation into the individual mind as well as the social/nation/group is certainly part, but not all of, the Centre’s focus. It is certainly one of the aims of this humble blog.
Past events include a lecture by Philosopher Prof Louis Charland from the University of Ontario at the University of Western Australia on 26 June 2012. Cribbing from the Centre’s newsletter which is also here Professor Charland addressed ‘lack of passion in Western psychiatry’ and ‘the fundamental roles of psychiatry pioneers Theodule-Arman Ribot, Philippe Pinel, Sir Alexander Crichton and Jean-Etienne Esquirol in that belief of passion in the genesis and nature of mental illness’. Prof Charland argued that passion needs to be reinstated back into Western psychiatry by first looking at the past lessons of history. There is a link to the lecture itself in the newsletter.
What impresses me is the generativity of this Centre and the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration and development of thinking and theory. At the Australian History Association Conference last year a keynote session concerned research into people’s responses to disaster, namely the Australian bushfires. Investigation into adolescent disorders in the seventeenth century by Ursula Potter from the University of Sydney has also led to a partnership with the School of Psychology and research into Anorexia Nervosa at that University. And indeed historians and cultural theorists will be continuing to investigate the development of psychoanalysis and psychology and its practitioners during the twentieth century.
That said, as I peruse the material on the ARC links I wonder where the people who have devloped a vast expertise in emotions and emotional expression, at least during the twentieth century and beyond, have gone. They seem to be underrepresented, if at all. Surely there is scope for developing conversation with, if not a critical examination of these arenas by the very professional groups concerned -whether within their particular frames of reference or indeed, in partnership with scholars from the Humanities streams. We will wait and see.
22 Saturday Sep 2012
William A McRae, The Psychology of Nervousness: The Mind In Conflict, OUP, 1942.
In The Psychology of Nervousness McRae sets out to write ‘the story of our inner judge and jury whose task it is to mete out punishment when we fail to live up to our ideals’. It was part of McRae’s intention to take psychoanalysis out of the doctor’s consulting room, away from a small and elite ‘avant garde‘. Ordinary people he inferred needed to know about the complexities of the mind the unconscious. McRae wanted to show people that understanding the motives that led to certain behaviours could and would help alleviate emotional suffering. He wanted people to rethink notions of behaviour as an outcome of ‘moral’ lessons beaten into them in childhood. The book addresses the complex matter of destructive anxiety; how envy, rage and jealousy amongst other things may undermine one’s relationship to self and another. It is one of the first of its kind in Australia, one of McRae’s three plain language introductions to psychoanalytic theory and treatment published between 1941 and 1945.
McRae does not pretend to be a theorist. He is an educator. He drew on the work of Freud and Alfred Adler and used illustrations from his clinical practice in Perth to develop his points. His ‘patients’ were people like his readers, parents, couples, working men and women, adolescents and children. Some were returned soldiers suffering from war trauma. All behaviour has meaning, he stated. It was a matter of searching for its motives and to accept that much was unconscious. ‘Just as nine-tenths of an iceberg is beneath the surface of the ocean, so an equally large part of our minds functions beneath the level of everyday consciousness’. Behaviour is not an outcome of moral success or failure, he argued but an expression of the instinctive forces within the self mediated by parental figures from infancy. This recognition, helped along by psychological research was ‘gradually teaching men to appreciate how the instinctive forces in the mind, functioning through his feelings, determine his behaviour to a large extent’. It is also a glimpse into notions of respectability, good behaviour and the emotional effort required to conform to the Australian society at that time.
Although McRae does not cite group theory as such he was firmly of the opinion that the individual is shaped by the group. As the child grows from infancy to adulthood instinctive forces are tamed, primitive forces, civilised..
Today, a person who is afraid dares not try to run away in many instances, simply because he fears more the rebuke of his friends who may call him a coward. Often he cannot give way to his burning resentment, for society may not countenance the form of revenge which he contemplates. Likewise when he craves to express the hunger of the reproductive forces within himself, he must learn control, for the rules of society are more powerful than the instinctive urges of the individual.
Social Darwinist ideas underpin the text: McRae describes how humans banded into clans, groups, communities, society to combat nature and thus enable the development of the civilised mind.
Just as a small child has to learn the art of co-operating with others in the home, so primitive man had to gradually educate himself to work with the group. Just as the child is completely selfish, and instinctively brushes aside the wishes of others, so primitive man, in the childhood of the race, acted in the same way. Through discipline and punishment, the child learns to obey the voice of its parents; primitive man, through the laws of the group, was forced to heed the rule of the majority. The power of thinking, however, came to his rescue.
The ability to think separates [humans] from the jungle past. Even so, he continues, destructive forces – desires to rape, kill and go to war – may break their bonds in some individuals and social groups. ‘Man will not realise that at heart he is still a cave man’. It is a struggle for all of us.
The first chapter, ‘Guilt Feelings and the Need For Punishment’ takes us into the heart of the matter – and a fundamental precept of psychodynamic therapy. It is hard to convey the understanding, yet so simple when it is understood, McRae says, ‘that the character of the individual is formed in the first few years of life,and that ever afterwards his behaviour is dictated and directed by this underlying style or pattern’.
McRae is particularly interested in Adler’s theory of the Inferiority Complex. For him it seems, the inferiority complex explains much.It is formed in the early interactions between parent and child – a point reiterated throughout his book. In a typical passage McRae writes
The style or pattern of life, formed in the first five or six years of a child’s life is extremely important, because this style of life is an unconscious one in later years. If a feeling of inferiority has resulted from the training the child has received during these years, that feeling will be embedded in the unconscious in later life, and the child will be heir to all those psychological ills that plague sufferers from Inferiority Complexes. Allied with the feelings of inferiority are usually feelings of fear and guilt, also unconscious – a fear of the world, which the owner has never been allowed to face with a feeling of courage or adequacy, and a feeling of guilt that is, perhaps, the natural enough consequence of a lack of love for strict parents, or the envy of others more fortunate.
Repressed feelings of fear and guilt…are potent factors in self destruction, he continued. ‘Inferiority Complexes, with their attendant unconscious fears and guilt, are also self destructive’. A chapter on dreams summarises Freud’s theory of the unconscious – about wishes, desires fantasies and symbolization before proceeding to look at unconscious processes in marriage as couple navigate the birth of children, parenthood and the cycle of life.
McRae, however, seems to have all the answers – his version of psychoanalytic theory and dream interpretation is somewhat reductive – along the lines of ‘this means this and that is equal to that. Even if he is trying to get his readers to think afresh about behavior and experience, beyond conscious apprehension.
In analytical work I find that many women feel that the change of life has robbed them of the very essence of womanhood, for few of them are well enough adjusted to realise that their period of usefulness is by no means over when they are no longer able to bear children. Psychologically, this accounts for many of the difficulties which many women experience when the change of life looms ahead of them, for these conflicts set up sorts of nervous reactions. Such women unconsciously resent the passage of time, and often nervous anxieties produce sleeplessness, which may be related to a fear of growing old and dying. This explains what adolescent daughters often find their mothers so trying, for their young charm and freshness intensify the mother’s jealousy, which is unconscious, but finds apparently legitimate reasons to express itself.
Reception of The Psychology of Nervousness was lukewarm. It was noted in the press across Australia particularly in Western Australia. It was warmly recommended to readers by the editor of the ‘problem page’ in Perth’s Daily News. The editors of the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, far north Queensland was somewhat more direct. The Psychology of Nervousness was ‘the least convincing’ of McRae’s three books on everyday psychology, they wrote.
The general reader is rightly cautious about disagreeing with experienced opinion in such matters as this book deals with, but he will be hard put to find support from his own knowledge for many of the claims this writer makes. The manifestations of the unconscious mind seem altogether too wayward and remote, and while it may be granted that the unconscious mind, at times, works in anything but a logical way and is a latent influence exerting great effect on an individual’s life, the layman feels that psychologists tend to resort too frequently to the unconscious mind for explanation of certain types of human behaviour. The reason quite often may he a purely physiological one or at least a combination of body chemistry and mind. It may all amount to a question of first cause and that is a great field for argument.
Perhaps McRae’s analysis too reductive for them.
The general reader falls into this line of thought when he reads that if a child is thrashed for stealing he thenceforward unconsciously looks for and feels the need of punishment whenever he commits theft again. Again: “There have been few “perfect crimes’ because the culprit usually leaves a clue which proves his undoing. He unconsciously desires punishment, so makes a little error in order to be detected.” This seems to endow people with an extraordinarily high ethical sense and to discount the force of self preservation.
Perhaps, the editors suggested, it was better to let things lie even if they were interested in McRae’s chapter on shell-shock and war neurosis and hysterical conversion symptoms.
One valuable advance in psychology has been the demonstration of how internal conflict can affect the organs of the body and produce disease. Mc Rae’s observations on the subject are highly interesting. We can understand that when a conflict is solved the Individual finds life more harmonious and that he gains in physical and mental health but conflicts seem to he part of the price of man’s existence and they must have had considerable influence on the progress of the world. How much do art and science owe to discords of mind?
McRae had faced such objections before. In his final chapter he stands by his position.
I do not require that it should completely satisfy the philosopher and the aesthete. I know that it works, that it heals the sick and comforts the weary, and that, because of this, must be right. If its concepts offend some, the answer that I give them is not an elaborate justification, but a simple indication of someone who has been cured, someone who has been made happier.
He then describes what is involved in an analysis… explaining the notion of the transference, free associations, dreaming and the negative transference – and matters concerning length of treatment, and the costs.
Sadly William McRae does not make the gallery of psychoanalytic pioneers, the subjects of the exhibition, Inner Worlds, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra during 2011. I wonder though, how many people struggling with their particular daemons and personal pains found something of relevance, and direction in his books? How many people sought treatment as a result? A year later in 1943 Mcrae’s public lecture series on psychoanalysis for the University of Western Australia drew an enrolment of 297…
07 Tuesday Feb 2012
Posted in lectures
Tags
Australia, controversy, culture, History, psychoanalysis, religion
On 21 September 1921 Elton Mayo, Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, fulfilled an invitation to give the second Douglas Price Memorial Lecture. Mayo, known for his interest in Freud’s work had his own practice as a psychotherapist in Brisbane. With physician Dr T H Mathewson he studied the causes of nervous breakdown particularly its use in treatment of war veterans and shell shocked soldiers. As did his contemporaries, Tasman Lovell at the University of Sydney and Philip Le Couteur at the University of Western Australia, Mayo established the first psychology course at the University of Queenland and in 1919 and 1920 worked to establish a training program in medical psychology. He was particularly keen to develop a strong research base to underpin trainings in experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. Shortly after giving this lecture Mayo departed for Melbourne where he gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis to medical students. At the beginning of 1923 he departed for the United States for further training. He never returned to live in Australia.
Why Mayo was invited to give this, the second of what would be four Douglas Price Memorial lectures, struck my interest. Clearly the audience would include people interested in the new disciplines – psychology and psychoanalysis. Freud’s work was increasingly reported in the local press. Mayo was known for the psychology course he had developed at the University of Queensland – and made it into Joy Damousi’s list of pioneer Australian psychoanalytical thinkers. But the identity of Douglas Price has disappeared. He is not listed in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The National Library’s site, Trove, provides little information about Price beyond a couple of book titles and pointers to the newspaper collection. Google provides a few clues. A short history of All Saints Church in Brisbane, published by D.L. Kissick in 1937, reveals that Price held the post of Rector at All Saints Anglican Church in Brisbane from 1903 to 1911. He was Principal of Brisbane’s Anglican Theological College. Price edited a small paper, The Cygnet, until 1911. From 1912 to his death in December 1916, he edited The Modernist publishing in both items on literature, poetry and philosophy. Kissick explained how Price’s preaching increasingly conflicted with High Anglican Church doctrines of the Divine Nature of Christ. Describing these years as ‘the saddest and most disheartening
in the history of the ( Brisbane All Saints) parish’, Kissick outlinedPrice’s doctrinal differences with the Anglican Church. These eventually led to the Bishop forcing Price’s resignation in January 1911 and departure in April 1911. For Kissick Price
led his followers by devious ways from the reality in a search for a vain chimera of a religion of reason, from the true Faith to the man-made tenets of Modernism... ‘He finally denied Christ to be the son of God, holding there to be many sons of God and of himself he said ” I aspire to pass all barriers, even the bounds of personality, to yield myself to illimitable love, for I know I am one with God’.
Kissick’s short biography continued – not without its tenor of satisfaction as the movement Price founded eventually died away.
The Rev. D. Price then founded the Brisbane movement known as “Progressive Christianity” or “Modernism,” and was its guiding spirit until his untimely death in 1916. It is interesting to note that his last public address given on the Sunday before his death was entitled “Intolerance.” In 1921 it is said that the movement which he had led had become “moribund if not entirely dead.”
As Buckridge* notes Price’s ideas developed to the point of rejecting the doctrines of the Trinity, the Atonement, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Divinity of Jesus. Drawing from a Ralston’s portrait of Price delivered in 1920, Buckridge describes how ‘against ssuperstition and sectarian bigotry’, Price argued ‘that the true object of religion was to foster our moral passion through an appreciation of the wisdom, goodness and beauty of the human heart as manifested in the moral, intellectual and artistic achievements of human beings of all ages and creeds’. He was ‘favourably disposed to the “science” of eugenics, and to a belief in reincarnation’. Quoting historian Jill Roe, Buckridge notes that Price ‘made common cause with liberal Unitarians in Sydney and Adelaide,and with the Theosophists, whose world leader, Annie Besant, he publicly defended from attacks by Fundamentalists on the occasion of her visit to Brisbane in 1908’. ( Roe in Buckridge, 2006).
Price, a poet and novelist was a single man. He was devoted to his God, his work and enormously popular with his congregation. One of his sermons, summarised in the Brisbane Courier of 12 March 1910 reads as a commentary on the relationship between inner selves and the outer world – matters occupying psychoanalytic theorists for the next decades. Read alongside the scriptural based sermons of his colleagues, Price’s command of language – and knowledge of ‘the human beings as living and struggling in their daily lives’ is outstanding. Let’s listen and watch as he quietly mounts the pulpit and begins:
We are born as from a quiet sleep, and we die into a calm awakening, but between that sleep and awakening the possibilities of our being seem to be well nigh endless, but it is possible that we may learn to control the health of our bodies by the power of our minds; that telepathy may be so developed us to become of real use; that some sure means may be found of communicating with “the dead; that clairvoyant vision may supersede the use of telescopes and microscopes. He is a fool who lays down the law as to what is impossible. A nearer and more important possibility than any of ‘these is to learn to live at peace with one’s temperament. It is not our circumstances which mould our life, but the disposition we carry into those circumstances. Sorrow, for instance, is tempera- mental; it comes more from without than, from within; some natures attract it as the moon attracts the sea. Charles Dickens had many troubles, but he rose buoyantly above them. Amiel would have been sad, though his every wish had been obeyed. The innermost part of us is the mysterious, wonderful and possibly divine. The outermost part of us has a somewhat clumsy envelope, full of obsolete growths, and seldom so beautiful as we could wish. Between soul and body is another wrapping, or series of wrappings, we call ”temperament,” almost as limit ing .as our physical overcoat. This it ia which determines our way of looking at things. Possibly it is not part of our eternal being, but for the time being it is ours “for better or for worse.” We were not asked what kind of a temperament we would like any more than we were asked to choose our bodies.
Quite a different story emerges from the newspaper archive.Brisbane’s Courier followed his story from the time of Price’s dismissal as Rector of All Saints in December 1910 through to his death – and beyond. Rather than Price leading a bunch of followers from the church, as Kissick stated, Price’s congregation protested to the church hierarchy about its treatment of him. On learning of the Bishop’s demand for Price’s resignation, members of the Congregation met in January 1911 to protest it. Upon Price’s departure in April 1911 a group defected to form the Progressive Christians or Modernists Group.The Courier newspaper was the message bank. In December 1912 notices appeared stating Price had accepted the Modernist’s invitation to return to Australia as their leader. Price’s sudden and untimely death in December 1916 is not explained although Kissick infers that he suffered from a painful illness. After this the Modernists continued meeting and, in 1920, inaugurated the first of the Annual Douglas Price Memorial Lectures with Meredith Atkinson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney as speaker.
More published information about Mayo is available. Not only has he a place in the Australian Dictionary Biography but he is the subject of a biographical work The Enduring Legacy of Elton Mayo, published by Richard Trahair and Abraham Zaleznik in 1984. Mayo completed a year of medical training in 1901 but after becoming disenchanted with it, worked as a journalist before studying philosophy and psychology and developing his interest in Freud’s work. His initial career as an industrial psychologist, and psychotherapist in Australia was followed by a long period in the United States from 1923 where he became known for his work in business and organisational psychology. Mayo was from a high achieving family: his Adelaide based sibling, Dr Helen Mayo, was well-regarded for her work on infant mortality and parent education during the early decades of the twentieth century.
Mayo’s oration, ‘Psychology and Religion’ was published and found its way to reviewers as far afield as Perth’s Western Mail newspaper which produced a summary of his main points. Mayo seems to have set out to prove the veracity of Price’s views. Popular resentment of church authority ‘had almost died away’, he noted. People were more willing to assess for themselves the value the religious practices for themselves. Education and reading enabled them to disentangle these from philosophical and theological questions. ‘This last distinction has indeed become explicit in the churches themselves’, he noted:
It is evidenced in the insistence of the High Church Anglicans upon the value of religious practices as compared with religious discussions; also in their teaching that the ‘proof’ of Christianity is to be found not in the deductive or inductive logical processes, but in the personal experience of religious ecstasy.
Mayo’s focus, the focus, the psychology of religion, led to some interesting statistical facts. Citing a 1900 publication, Starbuck’s Psychology of Religion, in which the writer had gathered material from ‘1265 cases – 1011 males and 254 females’ drawn from a variety of locales, vocations, and churches, Mayo noted that conversion is a distinctly adolescent phenomenon beginning at the age of 7 or 8 years, ‘increasing gradually up to the age of 10 and then rapidly to 16; rapidly declining to 20 and gradually falling away after that’.
It was not to be considered as a manifestation of developing sexuality – perhaps a reference to Freud’s work – but recognised as part of the adolescent period of growth ‘in which the intellectual and emotional powers of the individual undergo a general and marked development; puberty is one aspect of such development’.
Mayo’s argument appears to have taken up Price’s idea of the self being at one with God. ,Civilisation brought together ‘the racial impulses’ a person had inherited and ability to ‘control such development by personal ideals of intellectual and practical achievement’, he argued. One’s strived towards a unity of self and then seek a corresponding unity in the universe about. Every separate thing is not as a thing in itself but part of a whole. One finds separateness, away from the ‘racial’ material from which one is constructed but then, Mayo argues, one is ‘compelled to merge the new-found self’ in the universe again. He concludes ‘It is in thought and feeling of this order that the religious experience, properly so-called takes its rise’.
Price’s thinking spoke to many in his congregation – a matter that the Bishops and Church hierarchy may have appreciated even as they rejected his heresy. As Mayo’s lecture also suggests,perhaps these people identified with the very human struggle he was able to articulate in his lectures – for the ability to find and live with one’s self and one’s temperament – the struggle, later articulated by psychoanalytic theorists since – and by those people who attempt this journey in the psychoanalytic consulting room.
Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes,A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005.
Ralston, A. “Douglas Price: A Biographical Sketch.” The Place of Ethics and Religion
in Education. Ed. Meredith Atkinson. Brisbane: Government Printer, 1920.
5-17.
Roe, Jill. Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia, 1879-1939. Sydney: New South Wales
UP, 1986, pp. 319-320.
