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Category Archives: Narrative and Memoir

‘Reading the patient’:’A Dangerous Daughter’

24 Thursday Jun 2021

Posted by Christine in Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, Narrative and Memoir, psychoanalysis and biography, Refugees

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anorexia nervosa, Dina Davis Author, Government policy concerning jewish refugees in Australia, Ivy Bennett in Australia, literature and psychanalysis in Australia, Psychiatry in the 1950s. Psychoanalysis in the 1950s Australia, psychoanalytic memoir Australia, Recovering the history of psychoanalysis in Australia

Dina Davis, A Dangerous Daughter, Sydney, Cilento Publishing, 2021.

Anat Tzur Mahalel, Reading Freud’s Patients: memoir, Narrative and the Analysand. Routledge, The History of Psychoanalysis Series, 2020.

‘What would the story of an analysis look like if it were told through the eyes of the analysand?’

This is a question from the blurb of Anat Tzur Mahalel’s study, Reading Freud’s Patients, released in 2020. Mahalel draws from memoirs left by Freud’s patients as she seeks to understand ‘how the patient’s experience differs from the one told by the analyst. There are case studies enough in the psychoanalytic literature as clinicians grapple with phenomena emerging in their consulting rooms. It is The patient’s muteness is Mahalel’s subject. Her questions concern, among other matters, the movement from the position of patient to author. And to what extent the act of writing about the space created between the patient and analyst, in Mahalel’s case, between Freud and his patients, expresses any late understandings and interpretations, and a translation of messages received from him’? ( Mahalel, p.60). She has used six studies:

Fragments of an analysis with Freud, by Joseph Wortis

Diary of my analysis with Sigmund Freud, by Smiley Blanton

My Analysis with Freud, Reminiscences, by Abram Kardiner

An American Psychiatrist in Vienna 1935-1937, and his Sigmund Freud, by John Dorsey

The Wolf Man and Sigmund Freud by Sergei Pankejieff

Tribute to Freud by Hilda Dolittle

‘Nothing written is ever erased’, Freud wrote. Mahalel takes this up, writing in her concluding chapter, ‘Psychic life is constructed of manifold layers that move at different paces and in different directions’. We need not to seek psychic transformation in the outermost, apparent layer of the psyche but to tunnel deep into the innermost layers, where apparently lost traces are revealed. The reminiscences and traces that seem to have been forgotten and therefore lost remain in fact forever present and archived in our psychic apparatus. Nothing significant is lost, only the path leading to it‘. (p. 190).

Mahalel’s reflections on writing, memoir, the mind and the unconscious, helps frame consideration of the Australian writer, Dina Davis’s fiction – memoir, A Dutiful Daughter, published in June 2021. It is based on the author’s life, including during her teenage years her analysis with an Australian born psychoanalyst, Ivy Bennett, who practiced in Perth from 1952 until 1958.

There is also a connection between Davis’s book and this blog.

I had first discovered Ivy Bennett, born in Lake Grace in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, during my early searches of the National Library’ digitised website, TROVE. Several early posts in this blog described how Bennett had made her way through scholarships to a lectureship in psychology at the University of Western Australia during the War years. Awarded a British Council Scholarship in 1945 Bennett sailed for England on 1 January 1946 and was introduced to Anna Freud by a compatriot, Ruth Thomas. Bennett subsequently trained with Anna Freud’s first cohort of students working with children at Anna Freud’s Clinic. These included refugee children rescued from Theresiensdadt. After completing further training to Associate level with the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1951-2, Bennett returned to Australia intending to settle permanently and establish a psychoanalytic practice. However she returned to Britain in 1958 intending to gain her full qualification. She subsequently married and moved to the United States to practice for many years in Kansas.

Dina Davis was an early correspondent, introducing herself and her connection with Bennett. Perhaps this connection stirred her memories and the book is the result. Davis has named her protagonist, Ivy, a tribute to Bennett and the place she has in her memory. Her work with Ivy Bennett ‘saved my life’, Davis has written. Later, long after Bennett had left the country, the memory of her analysis sustained her through another difficult time.

‘Ivy ‘is a teenager, the elder daughter a Jewish couple living in New South Wales in the 1950s. They reached Australia in flight from the Nazis in the war years. The horror of the Nazi death camps has particular meaning for this family, and for Ivy. For to eat is to live. From the the onset of anorexia nervosa when Ivy increasingly comes under the control of ‘The Voice’ that demands she not eat; her family’s rejection of her illness, and devastatingly for Ivy, her exile to stay with Western Australian relatives far from her home in the eastern states, Davis’s writing is spare, tight, and controlled. And when, at last she reaches Dr de Berg ( Dr B), the relief is palpable. Ivy has found someone who has faith in her.

There are the sessions. Dr B explains the structures of the psychoanalytic process, showing Ivy how ‘The Voice’ is manifest of an internal superego. Ivy learns that it is a part of her, and thus able to be managed by her. This, along with the naming of her condition ‘Anorexia Nervosa’, frees her to resume her life as a young adolescent with her future ahead of her.

There is much more to this story of a young girl growing up and learning to know and trust her mind. She has to negotiate peer group pressures, friendships, early love, and all the confusion this entails. Following an incident at a beach where one of her group almost drowned. Ivy’s presence of mind and ability to do what needed to be done, shows Ivy her own strength. As is the writing of this book.

I will leave it to others to review “ A Dangerous Daughter” more fully. As Dina Davis acknowledges, its beginnings lie in the chance encounter with part of her history when she found this blog, and the deeper memories it stirred. And, reflecting on a time long past, she makes the proper claim for her voice and its narration. The result is deeply moving. ‘The subject finds expression within the limitations or prohibitions of the censor, and yet the psyche ‘is inevitably drawn to speak its own voice’, Mahalel writes. ‘The text is the result. The text expresses not the engraving of the outer layer… but the allusiveness of psychic life, of the movement between layers of consciousness, internal entities, and time’ (190).

“ A Dangerous Daughter ‘ is an important contribution to Australian psychoanalytic literature and memoir. Here is the link to purchase the book.

Foraging in the Geroe archive: Finding Aileen Palmer’s lost thesis

16 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by Christine in Archive work, Historical research, Narrative and Memoir, Psychiatry, psychoanalysis and biography, western australia

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Biography, Managing archives, Relicts, respecting scholarship, Sylvia Martin, The things one finds in unexpected places

Archives are relicts of a life. Bits of paper, shopping lists, advertising fliers for stoves, oil heaters and cars, personal messages and notes, are clues to the day in day out matters that people think about. Clara Geroe’s archive has many such things, all tossed into a suitcase and left for posterity. One smiles to discover a note in Geroe’s handwriting scrawled upon the back of some learned paper:  ‘Would you like to dine with us tonight?’ To whom was it addressed? Probably the person was sitting next to her, both of them lulled into boredom by some psychoanalytic conference speaker or other. Was it the end of the day? Or just after lunch with another three lectures to go? Did she disagree with the speaker? Or had it  occurred to her that she had forgotten to extend that particular invitation?

These are the little things found woven into correspondence from colleagues, poems, a paper for her interest, books, pamphlets and even a recipe collection. Archives are treasure troves of oddments. Some discoveries are totally astonishing and unexpected.  Archive work is a risky business.

In her early years in Australia Geroe’s English teacher, the author and literary critic Nettie Palmer, introduced Geroe to her family: Vance, her husband and a leading Australian author, and her daughters, Aileen and Helen. It is a side story in Sylvia Martin’s excellent biography of Aileen Palmer, Ink in her Veins. Geroe, a  cultured woman, and deeply interested and knowledgeable in literature and the arts, may have appreciated the Palmer’s friendship. Aileen Palmer’s work during the Spanish War, and her driving ambulances in England during the blitz, would have been known to Geroe. Aileen Palmer also studied French literature at the University of Melbourne and wrote a thesis on Proust. At the time of publishing her book, Martin said, no copy of the thesis was to be found. When Aileen broke down after her return to Australia from London, it is possible the Palmers sought advice from Geroe. Martin discusses Aileen’s hospitalization and psychiatric treatment at length. For a time she was a patient of Geroe’s – something Martin also discusses in her book. Perhaps Aileen liked Geroe enough to give her a copy of her thesis. Maybe it was a forgotten loan only to turn up almost thirty two years after Palmer’s death in Geroe’s archive…

Here is the link to Aileen’s story retold  in Martin’s piece, The Lost Thesis, ‘published last week in the online journal,  ‘Inside Story’.

 

Psychoanalysis and Biography – On Matthew Flinders, Regency Gentleman, Mariner and Explorer

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by Christine in Narrative and Memoir, Sidney J. Baker

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Sidney J Baker, My Own Destroyer, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962.

Biography, like History and Psychoanalysis, is fraught with subjectivity. It is an interpretation;  a meeting with peoples past where everything,  the unconscious constraints and restraints that are part of thinking and being, differ form the present. All that remains are  letters, and photographs. Some, preserved by chance, a result of being shoved into a drawer and forgotten, may turn up decades later.  We do not know what was left out nor what was invented. Then there are myths and legends which have been passed down generations.  Small stories and events, insignificant when they occurred, come to be symbolic of nationhood. Heroes and anti-heros imbued with super-natural qualities are its totems. We make history to suit our present proclivities and understanding. But we challenge the gods at our peril.I think it is like that for the explorer Matthew Flinders. Australian kids learn about him in primary school.  He is described as a brilliant navigator, a scientist, hydrographer, leader and respected  ship’s captain. Kids learn that in 1798 together with his friend, the surgeon George Bass, Flinders established there was a strait between mainland Australia and the island state, Tasmania.

In his biography of Flinders, published in 1962, Sidney J Baker traces Flinders’s naval career after his return to England in 1793 and back to Australia in 1794 where he met George Bass and, together with him, began exploring and charting the New South Wales coastline in 1795. Between them they established that Tasmania was separated from the Australian mainland by a strait – effectively cutting sailing time for ships voyaging from England and Australia. In 1801 a year after again returning to England Flinders’ credentials were strong enough for him to be given the captaincy of the Investigator. He had recently married, causing serious run in with authority when he risked his command to smuggle his wife on board  just before he set sail. It was against Admiralty policy. Given the choice, Flinders decided to sail  his wife – a story recorded – perhaps oversensationally – in Australian author Ernestine Hill’s biographical novel, My Love Must Wait. WE do not know what part his wife had in this decision. In 1802 at the age of 28  Flinders circumnavigated the Australian coastline in his ship the Investigator.Part of Flinders’s success was that he had beaten French survey ships which were also exploring the Terra Australis region at this time. When he set out to return to England in 1803 his charts were ready for publication. His carefully constructed  maps and charts were brilliant. They were used well into the twentieth century. So great is his reputation that his imprisonment at Mauritius by the French from 1803 to 1809, delaying his return to England and his wife is difficult to explain.”A mere glitch” many biographers imply as they skate across this  chapter from  Flinders’s life. It was just unfortunate, they sigh. He was a victim of the   British-Franco war and an intractable French governor.

You have to be game to wonder whether this was really the case.  Sidney J Baker, thinks not. Perhaps this is why his 1962 biography of Flinders My Own Destroyer,mined for its facts rather than interpretation finds its way into later works and bibliographies but in itself has faded from public view. Sidney J Baker was a philologist and journalist. New Zealand born in 1912, Baker was well acquainted with the works of Freud, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in his younger years. Popularly renowned during the 1940s for his collections of Australian and New Zealand vernacular  Baker’s interest was in the way language reflected cultural identity. For settler Australians whose migration story was but several generations long Baker showed how English had become Australianised, reflecting a developing identity based on common experience of the Australian environment. In the early 1950s he was a regular book review columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, an editor of the International Journal of Sexology and author of a number of scholarly articles on the relationship between language and psychology published in professional journals.

Baker drew on psychoanalytic theories to seek the person behind the myth. It marks a radical step in the genre. Baker’s understanding of psychoanalytic theory led him to the view that  the perceptions and fantasies within one’s internal world  find expression in relationships with others.It enabled him to ask a pertinent question: why was it that Flinders, who was very successful, who had ‘out-Crusoed Crusoe’ in his conviction that the ordinary middle-class life was not for him died largely forgotten at the age of forty, ill and in penury? Let us follow Bakers’ interpretation.

When Flinders landed at Mauritius in 1803 he was famed for his achievements. He was regarded as ‘brilliant, solid and trustworthy’.  His name,  known to governors and seafarers, was so well known that the French Governor of Mauritius could not believe that such a personage would land on his remote shores in search of a port for urgent  repairs to his ship, the Cumberland. Even if it took some time to verify Flinders’s credentials, even if the French were reluctant to release their prize, this does not explain why his imprisonment lasted as long as it did.

There is grim fascination in watching a man pull down a mountain of distress upon his head. Especially if he acts as though anguish is a fulfilment and he secretly does not wish to avoid it, unless it is too late. Especially when it seems that his whole life has moved relentlessly to a single moment when there is no longer a way out and that is what he chooses.

You will see this happen to Matthew Flinders. And you will feel that it was something that Flinders could have evaded with ease if he had wanted to. He had the skill, the knowledge, the sagacity. He had almost everything in his favour except the ability to distinguish generosity from weakness, and because of this blindness his life was destroyed.

These patterns were established early in Flinders’s life, according to Baker.  Born in 1774 in Donington, Lincolnshire, England,  Flinders  was named after his father, Matthew Flinders, a busy surgeon, described by Baker as a small man who had followed his own father into medicine. Young Flinders was expected to follow his father but his childhood reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe directed otherwise. Like Robinson Crusoe, young Matthew Flinders clashed with his domineering father’s wishes. He aborred his father’s conservative, safe middle-classness and desire that his son follow him into medicine. Like Robinson Crusoe  Flinders gained ‘a competent knowledge of the mathematics, and the rules of navigation [and] learned how to keep an account of the ship’s course, take an observation’. At fifteen he secured himself an introduction to a ship’s Captain, Captain Pasley, who found him a place on the HMS Alert when Flinders was fifteen. In 1790 Pasley took him under his own charge on the Scipio and thereafter arranged his transfer to the Bellerophon.  In 1791 Flinders found another patron in Captain Bligh of Bounty fame. This voyage on HMS Providence, to the South Seas was for young Flinders,  to ‘Robinson Crusoeland’. Bligh’s forceful personality provided Matthews with a father substitute, Baker says. Bligh took Flinders under his wing,  providing his brilliant young protegé with opportunities to develop navigation and scientific observation skills.

And yet something went wrong. There is nothing in the records to suggest exactly what happened during his time with Bligh. In a letter written in 1806 while imprisoned at Mauritius Flinders refers to Bligh’s ‘prepossession against me…’ and so did not feel able to seek Bligh’s support for his release. At that time Bligh was governor of New South Wales, a post he held until January 1808.  A second letter dated 1807 refers to Bligh’s ‘regard for me with an unfavourable eye’ (Baker,1962:7).  Having antagonized his mentor, perhaps even evoked his envy, there was no return – at least in Flinders’s mind. Baker is not so sure. This seems to have been Flinders’s imagining, his fantasy. Flinders, he wrote,

had been drawn to Bligh by his commanding manner; now he felt anxiety because he had flouted it in some way. This was in essence identical with the factors that were to provide the almost intolerable burden of distress which clouded the last quarter of Flinders’s life. Knowing as we do the forthright clarity of Bligh’s opinions (even allowing plenty of leeway for his peppery disposition) we would hardly expect him to usurp credit due to Flinders for his explorations around the coast of Australia [as Flinders also suggested]. As Bligh’s biographers have pointed out he had many failings but jealousy was not one of them.

We cannot have a great deal of confidence in Flinders’s perception of Bligh’s ill will towards him. After Flinders finally returned to London Bligh took him to see the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV ‘presumably in an effort to aid him'(Baker, 1962:8).

Flinders had an uneasy, if not highly conflicted relationship with authority figures  – a legacy of his relationship with his father, Baker says. During this voyage home in what turned out to be an unseaworthy ship, HMS Cumberland – the flaw in his character revealed itself.  Again.

The flaw in Flinders’s character was a tendency to underestimate authority together with a rigidity of outlook that neither understood impulsive generosity nor deemed it worthy of personal pursuit. Some people who have authority exercise it with an arid inflexibility. Others are given to the luxury of warmth and second thoughts.

‘Tragedy begins by treading softly’.Baker recounts that after sailing from Port Jackson ( Sydney) to Timor one of the Cumberland’s pumps failed twenty three days out. Heading for the Cape of Good Hope Flinders realised that she would  not make it unless the Cumberland was repaired. The most likely place was Mauritius, then known as the Ile de France. Flinders, not realising that there was a war between England and France put in, moored his ship and arranged to pay his respects to the French Captain General of Mauritius, Charles Decaen 

Decaen, a minor official in Napoleon’s army, stationed in a rather out of the way place was  conscientious in his duty to the French Empire.He hardly expected one of the stature of Flinders to land on HIS shores. He kept Flinders waiting for two hours.  Flinders’s travelling documents were out of date naming the Investigator as his vessel – not the Cumberland.’  This man who called himself Matthew Flinders was an imposter, Decaen concluded. He was a spy and would not hear Flinders protestations to the contrary.

Flinders was arrested later that night, his papers confiscated and a guard placed in his room. Further questioning occurred… Decaen’s attitude, insulting of Flinders’s integrity and honesty continued. And yet, despite this, the Captain invited Flinders to dine, a gesture of impulsive generosity, Baker asserts but one which Flinders neither understood nor had a place in his character for. He interpreted it as a sign of weakness and as a man of honor refused the invitation. It was the beginning of his downfall.  He  rejected Decaen’s authority – as well as any possibility of finding common ground.  He demanded his case be handled by the French government. The result was that Flinders remained on Mauritius for three years longer than other prisoners in Decaen’s charge. He returned to England in 1809. He was ill – and did not recover. He died in 1814.

So what happened? Psychoanalytic theory comes into its own here. Baker believed that Flinders’s early difficulties with his father provide the blueprint for interpretation.The resentment Flinders felt towards Decaen was out of proportion to the reality, Baker argues. It invoked his relationship with his father, was vexed, fraught with ambiguity and guilt. Flinders was never able to defeat his father nor find his own place in relation to him. Decaen, like Bligh, and like Flinders’s father, was small in stature. Both were in authority over Flinders.  He could not find a way to negotiate. That was his downfall.

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

04 Sunday Nov 2012

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

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Clara Geroe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by Christine in Narrative and Memoir

≈ Leave a comment

I thought to record this post, and this blog, for myself and for anyone who shares this space. We see the power of the written word: of what it means to be able to write one’s thoughts in order to heal.

Draft No. 4

I was reading the late novelist’s short story “Redemption,” based on the accidental death of his younger brother in a horrifying farming accident, and found its sentences beautifully crafted. John Gardner, at eleven, was driving a tractor when his brother fell under its towed cultipacker, a pair of giant rolling pins for mashing the clods in harrowed soil that weighed two tons. In the story, grief almost destroys the father, like Gardner’s father a dairyman, orator, and lay preacher; the surviving brother is tortured almost to madness by guilt.

This sentence is about the wife and mother—Gardner’s was an English teacher:

Because she had, at thirty-four, considerable strength of character—except that, these days, she was always eating—and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, a woman who, in her years of church work and teaching at the high school, had made scores of close, for the most…

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