Category Archives: Newspaper reportage

About Looking After Children in Hospital – 1953

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by in 1950s, Bowlby and Attachment Theory, Children in Hospital, Conferences and Lectures, Newspaper reportage, Public debate

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In my previous post I noted that Hungarian born and trained psychoanalyst Dr Andrew Peto was a speaker at Sydney’s twelve day Pacific Seminar on Mental Health in Childhood  in August 1953. Sponsored by the World Health Organisation with sixty delegates – medical practitioners, teachers, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers -.from sixteen  west Pacific and South East Asian countries it was a talkfest on child psychology not seen before. The director of the seminar was Dr. F. W. Clements lecturer in child health at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the Universality of Sydney and  formerly chief of the Nutrition Section of W.H.O.  The purpose of the seminar was to  consider those forces in the child’s home and communal life that could help or hinder him in his growth towards a mature personality’. Curiously this international Congress was scarcely reported even though delegates were considering the leading research of the day. Melbourne’s Argus newspaper provided a brief overview of the conference under the heading: Experts have some cute ideas of how They’d Bring Up Mother” concluding that at the very least, professionals were better informed.The Sydney Morning Herald relegated the matter to the Women’s Pages with a major article on women doctors from South East Asia. In a thinly veiled attack upon these highly qualified professional women, the Herald wondered why they were not at home tending their children and carrying out household tasks.  Only one of the major Australian women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly contributed a well thought out item about a topic  covered during the conference about the needs of  children in hospital. As you will see the author, Veronica West, drew upon newly published Attachment research by John Bowlby and James Robertson.   West carefully negotiated some contentious issues between doctors and reformers.Thanks to the National Library of Australia’s website TROVE, we are able to read these articles easily. West wrote:

Are Australian hospitals mending the bodies of sick children while blindly subjecting their minds to emotional stress more damaging in many cases than the disease or condition from which they are suffering? Must the price of the child’s health be submission to an inflexible hospital routine which catapults him from the security of home to a world in which his two paramount fears are realised – desertion by his parents, injury at the hands of strangers? Is Australia to lag behind progressive English and American hospitals which encourage the presence of mothers at the bedside of their sick children? Many medical and hospital representatives who attended the Seminar on Mental Health in Childhood at Sydney University last August are asking themselves these questions.A few enlightened paediatricians (child specialists) and doctors have long been trying to introduce overseas reforms in Australia. The safeguarding of children from unnecessary, frightening experience and training the nursing staff in basic concepts of child psychology are other steps, being taken abroad.First to throw down an official challenge to the old hospital visiting system is the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. It now proudly announces the success of a scheme which makes hospital routine fit in with new daily visiting hours for mothers.

This article was set in motion by the distress of a friend who spent two weeks in an intermediate ward of a city hospital. She said she couldn’t forget the despairing cries of “Mummy, Mummy, where are you?” which she heard from a nearby children’s ward throughout the night. She was astounded to hear that mothers were only allowed to visit the children once a week. When my friend spoke to the night sister about the distress of the children, her anxiety for them was dismissed as maternal sentiment.

“Nonsense!” said the sister, “a sedative soon puts them to sleep. The kiddies are always like this for a couple of days after visiting days. We dread visiting days. They do more harm than good.” My friend was told that except for a few problem cases the children were perfectly happy with the nurses during the week. “They are quiet and good, and settled in, but as soon as mother comes they stage terrific tantrums.” When she told me the story my friend said that if her own child went to hospital and was as mentally distressed as some of the children she had seen and heard, she would insist, through her doctor, on reasonable access to her little girl. Was my friend being over maternal and foolish, or was she instinctively right? Í set about finding out.

West attended the Seminar on Childhood Mental Health in Sydney in August 1953. She wrote,

The Seminar on Mental Health in Childhood revealed something of the general impact of hospital experience on the child of pre-school age. Subjects discussed included depriving the child of the comfort of his mother’s presence, his fear of pain, the isolation and aimlessness of his existence, the uncertainty of ever getting home again, and the inner turmoil and emotional drive to which frail bodies were subjected.With two-year-olds or three year-olds, especially, it was pointed out, the immediate reaction was a period of agitated despair, during which the child screamed, refused food, and only exhaustion brought sleep. After i a few days he became the quiet, good, allegedly settled-in child-in reality the apathetic, frozen-emotion child who had reached a serious stage of mental sickness...Sir Ronald Mackeith, of Guy’s Hospital, London, told of reforms which remove the risk of hospital damage to the child’s personality. One of the simplest was the opening of wards to mothers, who fed, bathed, and generally assisted the staff in the care of their own child on their visits. The Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, I discovered, had been experimenting with daily visiting for the smaller children over the past two years, had found this a success, and had introduced regular daily visiting for all children four months ago. The Medical Director, Dr. Vernon Collins, said that he regards the ideal as “free visiting where the parents may come to the hospital at any time.” He believes that this is essential to build up good relation ship between the mother and the nursing staff and to get the best care for the child.

Quoting this as an example, I interviewed leading paediatricians, medical men, child psychologists, hospital medical superintendents, matrons and sisters. I found the paediatriciains and doctors awake to recent research and already trying to apply the new methods to their patients, but still uncertain ol how general reforms could be carried out. Their reactions were surprisingly mixed, with individual but not collective antagonism to the new methods. Some had not heard of  visiting – hour reforms, and wary of the threat to hospital routine, were reluctant to hear of, or discuss, the subject. Others equally ill-informed listened kindly, but remained unshaken in their conviction that present methods were best. As an official spokesman put it, they were “sitting pat and waiting.”

West seems unimpressed by that response. She continued:  Here is the statement of the official spokesman of that hospital-the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, Sydney, which has 485 beds and treated 11,777 in-patients last year…

“Just say we are interested in the entire subject and an studying all the material available, but we prefer to wait and see. There will be no immediate alteration in the Sunday visiting day for the children.”

Here, too, are some of the opinions expressed at interviews: First, a talk with a hospital matron with many years’ experience in children’s wards. “I think the reforms will have to come,” she said. “The seminar undoubtedly opened the eyes of some of us who have long prided ourselves on the physical care of children in our charge. The most efficiently run ward in Sydney is not worth the constant reproach of the screams of the frenzied child, or the misery and listless apathy of the quiet child, star ing blankly, hour after hour at hospital walls.”

The most outspoken of the pediatricians who recently returned from England and who had instituted more liberal visiting hours in his hospital outside London said this: “Christmas is coming, and we will again have Press photographs of happy children and gaily decorated ward:and once again people will murmur warmly, ‘The hospitals are wonderful going to so much trouble for the children!’ “What the enlightened child expert would like is a little of this Christmas sentiment from hospitals and doctors spread over twelve months in our children’s wards.“When I was a medical resident I agreed with the general opinion that the weekly visiting day for mothers, with its aftermath of temperatures up and chaos in the wards, was an unnecessary evil. “Experience brought wisdom. In the London hospital I arranged for the mothers to visit the children daily, dropping in and out for brief visits on the way to town or after shopping.”The mothers sometimes fed the children, tidied beds washed them, and were of real assistance to the nursing staff. Reassured by the seemingly casual visits of the mothers the children were happy and contented, and were discharged mentally and physically well. “Certainly some cried when their mothers left, just as children here in our private ward« who enjoy the. privileges of more frequent visiting do. But a little weeping at temporary parting is one of our natural human emotions. It bears no relation to the violent reactions, or, worse, the disturbingly quiet ones, of the visit-starved public-ward child. Of course, we must have hospitals for sick children, and any physical pain inflicted is negligible to the suffering it spares the child, but too often both doctors and parents undertake to put a child into hospital without giving sufficient thought to the matter”.

The Doctor continued: “Some parents fall down on ‘he job of preparing the child for what lies ahead. They, in mistaken kindness, tell him fairy stories or refer to his approaching period in hospital as a ‘party.’ “What happens when the child arrives for the ‘party’?

“Generally he is whisked away from his harassed mother at the admission office, and, stripped of his favorite teddy bear or chewing rug, he is jet propelled into his new world. For the next six days until visiting day he is walled up in a world of white, forsaken bv his parents, helpless against the towering, white-clad, masked strangers who periodically select him for injury. It is not the pain-most children can take pain better than adults-it is the terror of what it is all about that breaks the child. While the comfort of the sympathetic nurse is often refused by the child in his des- pair, the reprimands and threats of the thoughtless, ill tempered nurse aggravate the situation. “Some of our hospitals allow the mother to accompany the child to his bed, get him used to the nurse, as well as letting him keep his cherished toys.

“In others where haste and ordered routine is the rule the opposite is the case. In many of these hospitals it is still the current practice on chaotic tonsillectomy morning to line up about a dozen young patients on a form out- side their ward or adjoining the theatre for upwards of an hour, and drag them off one by one.. for the operation.”

A woman pediatrician had this to say: “‘Certainly periods in hospital do not affect all children, temporarily or permanently. This is also true of epidemics, yet we would not deliberately expose children to such a risk, I believe a system of staggered daily visiting hours would be best, with full co- operation between the doctor in charge and the sister. Of course, some mothers because of domestic duties or because they live a long way from the hospital would not be able to make the daily visit.”

And what of the position in hospitals or wards where the children may stay months or even years? Two doctors stressed the need for closer contact between mothers and children in such hospitals.

“I commend any doctor or parent about to confine a child to one of these hospitals to study Bowlby’s report to the World Health Organisation***,” one of them said. “As he and the famous Sir James Spence point out, these hospitals, despite the various activities, occupations, and entertainments arranged for the children, overlook one important factor -the depriving of the child of his mother. Perhaps Australia cannot immediately emulate these reforms, but some of the broken mother-child relationship can be repaired by extending visiting hours.

Finally I saw child psychologist Miss Zoe Benjamin. Clinging to mother, temper tantrums, bed-wetting, hostility towards the mother, and kindergarten activities are all typical symptoms of hospital experience,” said Miss Benjamin. Handled sympathetically by parents, these usually disappear, but can lead to serious results. The experts quoted agreed that the most urgently needed reform was an increase in visiting hours in children’s hospitals, which must be championed by an enlightened medical profession generally.

I for one was surprised to find this article published as long ago as 1953. I remember attending lectures at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital during the 1980s when Isabel Menzies Lyth from the Tavistock Clinic spoke about the needs of children in hospital. Here she advocated what one 1953 Australian Matron also promoted: that the ward be divided into smaller units with children allocated to a ‘team’ of carers during their admission? It seemed, upon listening to Mezies lyth that her recommendations and their implementations were far more recent. It is to be wondered about why such a large newspaper as the Sydney Morning Herald failed to report upon this and other matters arising from this international conference. Was there some sort of external pressure upon its editorial team not to do so? It would be interesting to look into this a little more.

*** “Child Care and the Growth of Love”-Penguin edition summary of the John Bowlby report to the World Health Organisation

References:

Child Care Is Their Subject. (1953, August 20). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), p. 5 Section: Women’s Section. Retrieved April 20, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18383141

Sick children need parents at their bedside. (1953, November 25). The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), p. 20. Retrieved April 20, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article41447234

 

 

 

 

 

Psychoanalysis in early 1920s Queensland

02 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1920s, Newspaper reportage

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On 17 February 1923 an announcement appeared in Rockhampton’s major newspaper, the Morning Mail. A local medical practitioner, Dr Wynne was to speak at the School of Arts on the subject of ‘Modern Medicine’.  The lecture was to be

a brief non-technical account of facts not generally known which are profoundly changing the conception of the human machine, including psychoanalysis.

Clearly the organisers were confident that the good citizens of Rockhampton would be interestedenough to attend. Rockhampton in Central Coastal Queensland appears to be about as far as one could get from the southern centres of culture and intellect, Melbourne and Sydney, let alone Europe. Founded in 1861, it grew to become a major shipping port with easy access to the Pacific and Asia. With prosperity came thoughts that Rockhampton would be the capital of Queensland. And, not least the Morning Bulletin, reflecting the social and cultural pursuits of its citizens, not only published notices and reports of lectures held by the various educational and cultural societies, but also editorial comment.  Psychoanalysis was a particular favourite: unlike their colleagues in Northern Queensland who published items critical of Freud’s ideas, Rockhampton editors were curious.

So far the few histories of psychoanalysis in Australia have focussed on events and trends in the capital cities. No doubt the omission of regional and country interest is due to the practical difficulty of wading through piles of newspapers from such remote places as Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, Broken Hill in far west New South Wales as well as Rockhampton. Such places are about as far as one can get from Europe as well as major Australian cities. Like Philip Le Couteur  at the University of Western Australia they tried to describe psychoanalysis to readers, to explain its meaning and usefulness. The desire of writers of the history of psychoanalysis  to bed down a story of psychoanalytic thought  and practice in Australia, either with a complement of  pioneers, or arguing psychoanalysis really began with the arrival of the training analyst, Clara Geroe, from Hungary in 1940 is also pertinent.

There was no lack of information. Books, journals, articles and pamphlets  imported from Europe- about psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and science, education – were  advertised and reviewed in the press. Scholars left Australia in search of an education and returning with news of doings abroad – even if these were buried in newspaper columns. By the late 1890s, as historian Rod Kirkpatrick has shown, most, if not all country towns in New South Wales had their own newspaper All the colonies had their own share of local and regional papers as well as several dailies in each of the capital cities. Editors knew what was going on in their town. They knew who was who, they ensured they were invited to events, large and small. They talked to the townsfolk. In the quest for copy, reporters covered everything from childrens’ music exam results, public meetings and lectures as well as the politics of the day. Contributors ranged from local clergymen and missionaries to reporters using shorthand to record a lecture for those who did not arrive. Newspapers – state, regional and local – received  cables from a central international news service. It is not unusual to see a word for word report on one European event or another in several papers across the country.

In January 1924 ‘An Interview with Freud’ appeared in The Capricornian, republished in full from Popular Science magazine. 1200 words long, it detailed the meaning of psychoanalysis and described its principles – about the civilisability of the self-  for readers. Clearly this editor was confident enough of his readership to publish it.

‘Psychoanalysis is a science that leads man through the mazes of his own subconscious where the repressed desires, the fabulous monsters lie in ambush’, the article, the result of a long night’s talk with Freud, began.

Professor Freud said: ‘Modern psychology has discovered the ego is not the lord of his own domain. We are neither the captains of our souls nor the masters of our fate. Far from dominating our thoughts by the exercise of free will, we do not even know the mysterious tenants that inhabit our unconscious selves. Psychoanalysis, with infinite labour, succeeds in making us dimly conscious of the motives that sway us, of the blind instincts, often savage anc criminal, that shape our minds and determine our decisions’.

Psychoanalysis deals largely with sex, Freud continued. ‘Sex is the root and the fruit of the tree of life; it is also its blossom’…Psychoanalysis ‘teaches us that we never entirely overcome the animal, the savage, the criminal or the child in ourselves’.

Readers learned how a baby passes through all the phases of evolution; that every child is a savage; that every human perversity is part of normal development and that ‘psychic shocks’ received in babyhood, inhibit a man’s normal development in whole or in part’. If we deny the sex life of a child, Freud holds, we deny nature itself.

Settler Australians were acutely conscious of the presence of indigenous people, if only to remark upon their absence. Aboriginal people were believed to have ‘died away’, if not tucked away on the missions.  In Social Darwinist terms,the ‘lowest on the racial scale,civilisability of Aboriginal people had been debated issue for much of the previous century. In 1924 Queensland, like New South Wales and Western Australia, was adopting policies of removing Aboriginal children from their parents, focussing on those with an ‘admixture’ of European heritage, in an effort to preserve the purity of the white race.  Freud’s notion of the savage within, so clearly articulated here for a general readership, not to mention its circulation in professional and academic circles, would have been confronting for good citizens believing they had mastery. This is what they read:

Civilisation, in self-defence, teaches us to forget, to deny the disguise, to repress, or to ‘ sublimate ‘ our criminal instincts. However, it cannot banish them completely. They crop out under certain circumstances in the most staid, the most respectable individual. They are responsible for curious contradictions in our nature. They explain why the same individual may be both cruel, and kind, selfish and generous, voluptuous and austere, depending upon the conscious or unconscious forces at sway. They betray themselves, if not to us, to the trained investigator. They subtly colour our thoughts, they generate our dreams, they enter in one form or another into every activity…

The struggle of repression absorbs a vast amount of our energy that could be directed into more useful channels. It explains the tardiness of human progress. Driven from the conscious mind, the repressed desire finds other outlets. Unaccountable nervous maladies, hysterias, neuroses, curious twitching of the face or the fingers, inexplicable obsessions, like Dr. Johnson’s mania to touch every lamppost, are merely [some] gestures of repressed desires. We read of a good man gone wrong. The very fact that he guarded his nether nature so carefully gave volcanic force to its eruption. The force of the explosion stands in a definite ratio to the degree of repression. Repressed wishes unable to escape cause… emotional and nervous ulcers, drawing strength from the healthy tissues surrounding them. Just as tumours, of which we are unaware, influence our physical wellbeing and react upon our emotional life, so tumours of the mind exercise a baneful influence over our physical and mental activities, even if we are blissfully unaware of their existence.

In future years Rockhampton people would host educators and lecturers from the University of Queensland and other places who sought to explain psychology and psychoanalysis to them. And through learning about these activities we can speculate just how closely settler Australian aligned their cultural and intellectual interests with those of the home country.

A Peep Into the Subconscious – Adelaide 1951

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in 1950s, Conferences and Lectures, Newspaper reportage, South Australia: Newspapers

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This item is taken from Adelaide’s ‘Advertiser’ dated 27 October 1951. One can never be sure about the reliability of sources when writing history. So much data is borne of subjectivity; what is included or excluded is a matter for a writer long ago. One can catch a glimpse, partially, into the milieux past and try to work out what happened on the basis of that evidence. History occurs in a space between now and then.

In October 1951 a newspaperman, by the name of Frank Dunhill, embedded himself in a meeting with a group of people interested in psychoanalysis. The resulting sketch of ordinary folk, albeit tongue in cheek, reveals a little bit about Australia in the 1950s. It is about the cautious exploration of new ideas and people, the emerging influence of European refugees in this post war period, about women finding time despite childcare responsibilities and wannabe pretenders with agendas of their own. Perhaps this was actually a group of Melbournians meeting with Hungarian born Clara Geroe with the resulting piece sold for publication  in Adelaide?  Perhaps the meeting was, actually, held in Adelaide.  Was it that Dunhill, like his counterpart in Sydney, Sidney J Baker, was knowledgeable about psychoanalysis – much more than he let on?  If anyone knows more about Frank Dunhill,  or indeed the people who attended these meetings, I will be pleased to hear from them.

Let us listen to Frank:

“There is more in psychoanalysis that meets the subconscious eye.

I know, because this week I attended the first meeting of a group of amateur Adelaide psychoanalysts who want to meet every week and talk about it.

Psychoanalysis deals with the analysis of the unconscious mind. Eight people were in the group. They included a new Australian from Hungary, a former commercial traveller who had read nearly all the text-books on the subject by Freud, Jung, and Adenauer, ( interestingly, a German pacifist and peacemaker within Germany during WW2…) a widow with one child, and a married woman — mother of three children – who came to Australia from Holland about 16 years ago. The convener of the meeting, a new Australian, also from Hungary, said he had studied psycho analysis in Paris, but had left for Australia before getting his diploma. Sitting next to him was an avowed pacifist from Melbourne, who once read half a pocket-book edition of a text book by Freud.

Next  to him was another pacifist who was once psychoanalysed, but was never told the result. Our host was a Scot.

I found my psyche was my soul. It had nothing to do with ‘Psyche at the well’.

The discussion eventually centred on child education.  Our host said he had often applied psychology as distinct from psycho analysis, to correct his child when she mis behaved. If that failed he used force. He found a combination of the two ‘very effective.’ The discussion went on. A lot of technical jargon passed over my head, and I didn’t catch up with the thread of things until somebody discussed mak ing a date for the next meeting.

That took a bit of working out because several worked shifts in their jobs. But by submerging their superegos for the common good they finally decided on Sunday night. The two women then went home and took their restraining influences with them.

After that things went a bit haywire. The two pacifists tried to show how wars could be stopped by psycho-analysis, but the rest of the meeting disagreed. Somebody accused a pacifist of woolly thinking when he tried to draw an analogy between oranges on a tree and people in a country. d Finally, psycho-analysis was discarded altogether and the discussion became a straight-out debate on pacifism,. The two pacifists became almost aggressive in defence of their own cult. When the meeting broke up about 11 p.m. the convener said he thought a plan of action should be drawn up at the next meeting. That made our host laugh uproariously. He thought that was the idea of the meeting at his home.

But as everybody had become acquainted and had in a way bared their souls to each other, the evening had not been wasted. I said good-bye, and left with a new-found Freudian complex and a now subdued pacifist as my companion.

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.