Category Archives: New Psychology

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.

‘The New Psychology’ – Western Australia, 1913

04 Thursday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1910s, New Psychology, western australia

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It has been a delight to discover the National Library of Australia’s online digitised newspaper collection.  I remember looking at it in the early 2000s or therabouts and finding a little creaky. It is possible, now,  to glimpse of what people were thinking and reading about  across the country far more than before. The archive dates from about 1830 through to  1954. It covers city, regional and country newspapers.

It is clear that Freud and psychoanalysis – or ‘The New Psychology’  had  a significant following in the first decades of twentieth century Australia – at the time Freud was becoming known in Europe.  Surprisingly for us twentyfirst century sophisticates, interest appears to have been more intense in the more remote places like Rockhampton in Northern Queensland, Broken Hill the mining town in far west New South Wales than in  capital cities such as Melbourne or Sydney.  Kalgoorlie, a gold mining town in Western Australia, was another surprise along with Perth, the Western Australian capital city. The Adelaide Advertiser, edited by the Bonython father and son during the first half of the twentieth century was also a frequent reporter.

In his book, The bold type : a history of Victoria’s country newspapers 1840-2010,  historian Rod Kirkpatrick notes that regional and country newspaper editors  played a pivotal part in their communities. To gather news they needed to know what was going on. They attended meetings and gatherings, they talked to friends, neighbours and were on familiar terms with others. The editors knew the interests of their communities and published accordingly. It maybe, though, that these editors had an interest in the subject. Newspapers were a source of intellectual input for people living in these remote towns. Workers Education meetings and evening lectures provided another source of information.

One of the first items I located in the online collection concerned a Workers Education Association lecture: ‘The Aim of Psychology as Illustrated by Recent Developments’ presented  by Philip Le Couteur, recently appointed as Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy  at the University of Western Australia on 30 August 1913. Le Couteur, born in Kyneton in Victoria, was a famous cricketer and a Rhodes Scholar. He had studied experimental psychology under Karl Buhler at the University of Bonn in Germany before returning to Australia to take up this post. In Vienna Freud and his colleagues were meeting regularly to discuss psychoanalysis; Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria was first published in 1905. Freud had published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901.

Le Couteur  differentiated psychology from the occult, the spiritism that so interested former Prime Minister Alfred Deakin – noting that psychology and psychical research are different subjects. There is no hocus-pocus about psychology ‘which aimed to explain mental facts.’  le Couteur provided a lucid account of the work undertaken ‘by Dr Joseph Breuer and his assistant Freud’ on the phenomenon of hysteria.  He explained that ‘Freud’s work is completely unknown to general readers and deserves to be better known’.  Further ‘it shows how the results of purely psychological investigation can be utilised by medicine for the healing of certain diseases’. For Le Couteur, it was Breuer’s original contribution, rather than Freud’s, that needed to be acknowledged.

The psychological nature of Breuer’s work rather than the therapeutic that interests us tonight, although the latter is intensely interesting. It was Breuer who first regarded hysterical patients as suffering from a mental rather than physical disorder, and diagnosed and treated them accordingly.

Le Couteur went on to provide  an account of dream interpretation, the use of free association and the differentiation between conscious and unconscious processes – now the basic tenets of psychoanalytic practice subsequently developed by Freud.

In 1918 Le Couteur left the university to take up the headmastership of Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne. Why he did so is not clear – perhaps it was closer to home and family. But this lecture, published in its entirety,  by the West Australian Newspaper – along with a consistent stream of articles about Freud, his theories and followers published in newspapers across the country in the years to follow – shows that recognition  of Freud’s ideas was not confined to  small groups of doctors, theologians and philosophers in Melbourne and Sydney on Australia’s Eastern coastline,   but found intelligent readership in places geographically and culturally as far away as one could be from cosmopolitan Vienna.

References:

1913 ‘THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA.’, The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954), 2 September, p. 5, viewed 04 August, 2011, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26883990

The University of Western Australia, School of Psychology, website: The History of Psychology, 1913-1918, http://www.psychology.uwa.edu.au/community/history/1913-1918 accessed 4 August 2011.

Rod Kirkpatrick, The Bold Type: A History of Victoria’s Country Newspapers 1840-2010, Ascot Vale, The Victorian Country Press, Association, 2010.