Category Archives: psychoanalysis and biography

‘Reading the patient’:’A Dangerous Daughter’

24 Thursday Jun 2021

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

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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.

‘The continual inner search: the life of Roy Winn’ – Australia’s first practicing medical psychoanalyst (1890-1963)

10 Wednesday Jun 2020

Posted by in psychoanalysis and biography

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Margaret Winn (2020) The continual inner search: the life of Roy Winn, Melbourne, Kerr Books.

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Margaret Winn, Roy’s grand daughter, has compiled this biography, published by Kerr Books in Melbourne in 2020. It is a labour of love, a task that has consumed a number of years, off and on. Margaret has sought to understand the rather remote figure of her grandfather who died in 1963, when she was 11 years old. He was not very interested in what she had to say, she recalls. But he was remembered by his psychoanalytic colleagues for his integrity and his contribution to the development of psychoanalysis in this country. This book, written for her family, is also Margaret Winn’s contribution to the history of psychoanalysis in this country.

Roy was born into a privileged family in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1890. He was the third of four sons of William and Janet Winn and a member of a leading, ‘God fearing’ family, members of the Primitive Methodist Church. His father and uncle Isaac Winn were active in church affairs but are also remembered for Winn’s Ptd Ltd, a super emporium store located in the middle of Newcastle. William Winn the deputy president of the Temperance Society – and young Roy took the pledge at the age of seven. Not unusual for young children in this age of evangelical Christianity. As a young man Roy wanted to be a medical missionary – the Australian Methodist Church had a mission in Fiji.

A significant section of the book is devoted to Winn’s war service… from his decision to sign up as a Medical Officer in 1915 until the war’s end. Winn lasted until the end of the war. After losing his foot towards the end of the war, he returned home and, eventually found his way to psychoanalysis. Reg Ellery, another psychiatrist interested in psychoanalysis, returned home at his own expense within a year of signing up. Winn’s Melbourne colleague, Paul Dane struggled with illness contracted in the field. And, like Winn, went on to use his war service in his later work with veterans.For her grandfather’s story Margaret Winn has consulted historians and libraries to trace her grandfather’s path through the war. Winn’s novelised version, ‘Men may rise’, is her guide. She thus contributes an account to the increasing pile of such family histories to the Australian historiography of war… and the foundation pile for historians of psychoanalysis in this country. For it is in Winn’s reflections, recorded in Men May Rise, that he comes to understand that he is both doctor and patient.

In 1920, newly married and with a child in tow, Winn and his wife travelled to England for Winn’s analysis with Robert Riggall, a member of the recently formed British Psychoanalytical Society. He returned to Australia in 1922 and tried to interest colleagues in the application of psychoanalysis to medical work. It did not work out and, in 1931, Winn left hospital practice altogether, and established his own practice in Macquarie Street Sydney. Margaret Winn also notes that her grandfather was not a trained psychoanalyst: he made use of what he had learned through his own analysis and reading, with patients. He was appointed as an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1935.

Winn was actively involved in the effort to bring European Analysts to Australia during the 1930s. He was a liaison point for Ernest Jones in London, who, in one of the twentieth century’s great rescue efforts, found places in the United States, Britain and in some Dominion countries for a large number of psychoanalysts potentially trapped in Europe as the Nazis took control. Alone, and together with a number of leading figures in the Australian milieu of that time, lobbied the Australian government for their admission. Of the six who applied, only two succeeded: Andrew Peto and Elisabeth Kardos who were granted visas late in 1939. They decided not to emigrate. Clara Geroe, granted a visa with her husband, arrived in March 1940 and was subsequently appointed as Australia’s first training analyst through the British Psychoanalytical Society. Winn continued as an Associate until 1952. At this point he funded the establishment of the Sydney Institute of Psychoanalysis. By then Andrew Peto had arrived and, like Geroe, was working as a training analyst.

It was one of Winn’s colleagues, Janet Neild, who referred to the ”continual inner search’ that he carried through his life. This may have been his public face, or his working persona, or the place where he could carry out his own internal mission. Margaret Winn, a family member with a different experience of Roy, wants to understand her grandfather’s mind, as much as she can. She speculates about his ‘autistic’ side: wondering whether this contributes to him being something of an ‘outsider’ – and thus able to strike out on his own. ‘I am not sure he was autistic’, Margaret Winn wrote to me in an email. ‘ He might be the source of the genetic thread to later generations who do manifest high functioning autistic characteristics’. This is, after all, for the family’s understanding.

In another, professional, sphere, Roy Winn’s contribution is important for Australian psychoanalysis. He helped bring it into the medical fold and held its place within Sydney’s medical world. In a sense his work and dedication to seeing psychoanalysis established in this country was his quiet – and greatest- achievement.

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

16 Sunday Feb 2020

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

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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’.