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Psychoanalysis and Northern Queensland -1925

07 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by Christine 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.

“Foundations of Behaviour” – McRae’s lecture series – Perth, Western Australia, 1943.

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by Christine in 1940s, Bill McRae, historical source material, Lay analysis, public education, western australia

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Georg Groddeck, William McRae

William McRae, The Foundations of Behaviour, Melbourne, OUP, 1945.

Writing of Western Australian Bill McRae in her history of psychoanalysis in Australia, Freud in the Antipodes, Joy Damousi asserts  McRae believed psychoanalysis was  reserved for those with deep-seated difficulties. His aim, she writes, was ‘to break down resistance which prevents us knowing ourselves’ and that he thought it was dreams that enabled such resistances to be accessed. Drawing on two books published by McRae during the 1940s –About Ourselves and Others (1941) and Adventures in Self Understanding (1945) Damousi also notes McRae’s ‘reformulation of the Oedipus Complex’ upheld particularly oppressive stereotypes about men and women, about male and female. (Damousi, 2005: 175-6). As offensive as these were, such stereotypes reflected his  time, Damousi explains. It was war-time. Gender roles were being reshaped, families were having to adapt to long absences of their menfolk; lives and careers were on hold. Women were involved in activities traditionally the domain of males. ‘McRae listened and interpreted the testimonies of those who spoke to him through this prism’. Damousi writes. It shows that psychoanalysis was moving from being used ‘to analyse individuals’ to define the place of these individuals within the community and society. ( p.178).

It is an interesting thought. Editorially this statement and Damousi’s reference to McRae’s work has been at a point where she wants to introduce what she considers to be a larger and more important issue:   advent of psychoanalytic institutes in Australia also during the 1940s.

My own impression of McRae is somewhat different – even as I find his version of psychoanalysis ‘thin’ and his writing repetitive. McRae’s stance on the relations between men and women were but one corner of his work. He also wrote of infants, children and dreams. Often, by his own admission, he framed his views from psychoanalytic texts he was reading at the time.  I have mentioned McRae’s lecture series given to the Adult Education Board of the University of Western Australia: ‘The Foundations of Behaviour’ in an earlier post. His intention was to present psychoanalysis in a form ‘that would be of immediate use’ to people approaching the subject for the first time. He hoped that by showing ‘how and why a child’s earliest years determine his basic attitudes to himself and others, and to existence in general’, and then how these basic attitudes persist through life’. We may read McRae’s take on psychoanalysis in relation to societal and family expectations of men, women and children. But I suspect that his purpose was not so much to define or to reshape but to underline the existence and importance of unconscious processes within the individual. He had a battle before him. McRae was aware there were those who remained sceptica.l Behind everything I say, McRae said, there was

evidence in plenty and the backing of some of the greatest minds of our time, but as you read through the book you can safely forget all this and test everything said in the light of your own experience of yourself and others. I ask for nothing more than this.
McRae’s 10 session lecture series demonstrates that he had a grasp of the complexities of psychoanalytic theory of which dreams are a part. His focus on the ‘inferiority complex’ though reveals his Adlerian preference.  He began Foundations of Behaviour with a general introduction – ‘How We See Ourselves’. We may be able to gauge the personality of others, he began, but how do we understand what causes people to act as they do? He drew attention to possible meaning in psychosomatic symptoms; to the mystery behind a sudden onset of acute anxiety or depression, and ways to understand the ‘vicarious satisfactions’ wrought through ‘stealing, delinquency, procrastination or antisocial behaviour for which we are ashamed, sicknesses behind which we hide, then we may not feel too happy about getting knowledge concerning our real motives, for then we may have to change our way of life and this is not easy or pleasant, especially when we have behaved one way for so long’.

This is a basic enough understanding in the twenty-first century but was not so in 1943. McRae’s  motive was to educate. He believed that the opportunity for people to to think about and practice this psychological knowledge might ‘help to materially reduce the amount of psychological ill-health in the general community’. He was critical of those who thought psychoanalytical knowledge should be kept from the public, not just because it concerned the darker side of one’s self, but because they doubted the possibility of presenting such knowledge in an intelligible to untrained listeners and readers.  Instead, he argued ‘we are striving to keep something out of sight’.

Reading McRae’s material is also to become aware of the multiplicity of psychoanalytic material circulating about the place. McRae seems to have been unaware of the work of Melanie Klein, DW Winnicott and others – and the battle over psychoanalysis then going on in war-time Britain. To outline ideas about the potential for psychoanalysis to address underlying matters within the psyche McRae drew on the psychoanalyst, and one-time member of Freud’s circle, William Stekel, whose book, The Beloved Ego, published in 1921,told the story of a king who ‘saw so much hypocrisy and evil that he mourned for the state of the world’. He asked the wise men of the land for advice. Evil may be in the hearts of men and women, they replied, but they are also loyal to you, McRae summarized. They have conquered the evil in themselves.  ‘Do you want to change man’s nature and tear the heart out of his breast. That you cannot bear the sight of Truth proves how wise was the kind Fate in inflicting short sightedness upon you and giving you spectacles’. Stekel, McRae continued, encouraged people to take off their spectacles so as to see the truth for what it is, ‘to own up to weaknesses and to welcome the overcoming of these as a victory and triumph’. Much material included in the lecture series, McRae warned his audince, ‘will be in direct opposition to cherished ideas – ideas which we have clung to with all the tenacity of one who is afraid to let go’.

McRae’s second lecture introduced  Freud’s theories of Ego, Id and Superego; to the slips and mistakes of everyday life. The process of becoming civilised was his theme. His third lecture. ‘The Importance of Birth’  underlined the subjectivity of infant experience. Psychiatrist Eleanor Joyce Partridge’s 1937 Baby’s Point of View, certainly had challenged old-school doctrines against capitulating to the needs of the baby. She found an ally in McRae and another of Freud’s circle, Georg Groddeck whose 1923 ‘The Book of The It’ challenged readers to get inside the mind of a child. McRae, fascinated, quoted from page 89.

Have you ever tried to get inside the thoughts of an unborn child? Try it once. Make yourself very, very tiny and creep into the womb from which you issued. This is not at all such a crazy challenge as you may think and the smile with which you dismiss my suggestion is childishly kind, a proof that the thought is familiar to you. As a matter of fact, without our being aware of it, our whole life is guided by this desire to get back to the mother. ” I should like to get back into you” – how often one hears it said.

McRae goes on to explain the effect of birth upon the baby…’perhaps this is the reason why nature requires so many years of dependence on the mother before the child loses the original pain of separation from the mother, physically’. When it all goes wrong, he continues, a person remains stuck, struggling to reconcile infant needs with the adult world. It is as good a summary as I can find – all the more significant when it is remembered that these ideas were new to people – even if, ‘somehow’, known. McRae takes the matter further:

Everyone of us still bears the effects of birth and these become very much a part of our deepest personality and although the physical part of the birth process is not remembered it has become part of our phantasy life (he uses the word ‘Phantasy’ as this refers to unconscious processes rather than ‘fantasy’ – the stuff of dreams and castles in the air) and as such it is remembered in symbols depicting birth – the most common are fear of snakes, mice and spiders, together with the phobias concerning enclosed spaces.

Freud wrote on Birth anxiety, McRae continued. Otto Rank focussed his entire theory on the birth process while Groddeck also wrote about the days after birth…

Have you ever pondered over the experiences of a baby who is fed by a wet nurse? The matter is somewhat complicated, at least if the child has a loving mother. On the one hand, there is that mother in whose body the baby has lain for nine months, carefree, warm, in undisturbed enjoyment. Should he not love her? And on the other hand, there is that second woman to whose breast he is put every day, whose milk he drinks, whose fresh, warm skin he feels, and whose odor he inhales. Should he not love her? But to which of them shall he hold? The suckling nourished by a nurse is plunged into doubt, and never will he lose that sense of doubt. His capacity for faith is shaken at its foundation, and a choice between two possibilities for him is always more difficult than for other people. And to such a man, whose emotional life has been divided at the start, who is thereby cheated of full emotional experience, what can the phrase Alma Mater mean, but a lie to scoff at? And knowledge will seem to him from the beginning to be useless. Life says to him, “That woman over there who does not nourish thee is thy mother and claims thee as her own; this other gives thee her breast and yet thou art not her child.” He is confronted with a problem which knowledge is unable to solve, from which he must flee, away from whose troublesome questioning he can best take refuge in phantasy. But whoever is familiar with the kingdom of phantasy recognizes, at one time or another, that all science is a kind of phantasy, a specialist type, so to speak, with all the advantages and all the defects of specialization.

Lectures 4 and 5 cover the Oral and Anal stages of development. Lecture 6, ‘The Development of Love or Altruism’ concerns the genital phase, a stage in which children begin to recognise minds of others than their own. It is entwined with the discovery of sexuality, McRae notes. He is following Freudian theory here, linking physical and emotional, sensuality and the development of thinking, elaborated in Lecture 8. The final chapter consists of a series of questions asked of McRae from his audience. These include technical questions – about the meaning of terms such as transference, resistance and repression. Some asked questions that may have been of immediate concern to them – could stuttering be cured? Why does my toddler run away?  There were questions about bottle feeding over breast feeding, about thumb-sucking and whether it was possible to abolish jealousy? Someone asked for a key to bringing up children while another asked when a psychologist could call themself a psychoanalyst. All were answered in terms of the need to understand unconscious processes – that the formations of later difficulties within one’s self and with others lay in the early relationship between mother and infant.

Theoretically it was not sophisticated stuff. McRae was no Freud, Melanie Klein nor Donald Winnicott – or even a member of the clique whose works he quoted. Perhaps he knew his limitations even as he educated others.

References: Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005.

William McRae, The Foundations of Behaviour, Melbourne, OUP, 1945.

Popular Psychoanalysis 1 – Bill McRae, ‘The Psychology of Nervousness’

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by Christine in 1940s, Bill McRae, Lay analysis, lectures, pioneers, psychoanalysis in lay terms, Public debate, public education, the psychoanalytic process

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William A McRae, The Psychology of Nervousness: The Mind In Conflict, OUP, 1942.

In The Psychology of Nervousness McRae sets out to write ‘the story of our inner judge and jury whose task it is to mete out punishment when we fail to live up to our ideals’.   It was part of McRae’s intention to take psychoanalysis out of the doctor’s consulting room, away from a small and elite ‘avant garde‘. Ordinary people he inferred needed to know about the complexities of the mind the unconscious.  McRae wanted to show people that understanding the motives that led to certain behaviours could and would help alleviate emotional suffering. He wanted people to rethink notions of behaviour as an outcome of ‘moral’ lessons beaten into them in childhood. The book addresses the complex matter of destructive anxiety; how envy, rage and jealousy amongst other things may undermine one’s relationship to self and another.   It is one of the first of its kind in Australia, one of McRae’s three plain language introductions to psychoanalytic theory and treatment published between 1941 and 1945.

McRae does not pretend to be a theorist. He is an educator. He drew on the work of Freud and Alfred Adler and used illustrations from his clinical practice in Perth to develop his points. His ‘patients’ were people like his readers, parents, couples, working men and women, adolescents and children. Some were returned soldiers suffering from war trauma.  All behaviour has meaning, he stated. It was a matter of searching for its motives and to accept that much was unconscious. ‘Just as nine-tenths of an iceberg is beneath the surface of the ocean, so an equally large part of our minds functions beneath the level of everyday consciousness’. Behaviour is not an outcome of moral success or failure, he argued but an expression of the instinctive forces within the self mediated by parental figures from infancy. This recognition, helped along by psychological research was ‘gradually teaching men to appreciate how the instinctive forces in the mind, functioning through his feelings, determine his behaviour to a large extent’. It is also a glimpse into notions of  respectability, good behaviour and the emotional effort required to conform to the Australian society at that time.

Although McRae does not cite group theory as such he was firmly of the opinion that the individual is shaped by the group. As the child grows from infancy to adulthood instinctive forces are tamed, primitive forces, civilised..

Today, a person who is afraid dares not try to run away in many instances, simply because he fears more the rebuke of his friends who may call him a coward. Often he cannot give way to his burning resentment, for society may not countenance the form of revenge which he contemplates. Likewise when he craves to express the hunger of the reproductive forces within himself, he must learn control, for the rules of society are more powerful than the instinctive urges of the individual.

Social Darwinist ideas underpin the text: McRae describes how humans banded into clans, groups, communities, society to combat nature and thus enable the development of the civilised mind.

Just as a small child has to learn the art of co-operating with others in the home, so primitive man had to gradually educate himself to work with the group. Just as the child is completely selfish, and instinctively brushes aside the wishes of others, so primitive man, in the childhood of the race, acted in the same way. Through discipline and punishment, the child learns to obey the voice of its parents; primitive man, through the laws of the group, was forced to heed the rule of the majority. The power of thinking, however, came to his rescue.

The ability to think separates [humans] from the jungle past. Even so, he continues,  destructive forces – desires to rape, kill and go to war – may break their bonds in some individuals and social groups. ‘Man will not realise that at heart he is still a cave man’. It is a struggle for all of us.

The first chapter, ‘Guilt Feelings and the Need For Punishment’ takes us into the heart of the matter – and a fundamental precept of psychodynamic therapy.  It is hard to convey the understanding, yet so simple when it is understood, McRae says, ‘that the character of the individual is formed in the first few years of life,and that ever afterwards his behaviour is dictated and directed by this underlying style or pattern’.

McRae is particularly interested in Adler’s theory of the Inferiority Complex. For him it seems, the inferiority complex explains much.It is formed in the early interactions between parent and child – a point reiterated throughout his book. In a typical passage McRae writes

The style or pattern of life, formed in the first five or six years of a child’s life is extremely important, because this style of life is an unconscious one in later years. If a feeling of inferiority has resulted from the training the child has received during these years, that feeling will be embedded in the unconscious in later life, and the child will be heir to all those psychological ills that plague sufferers from Inferiority Complexes. Allied with the feelings of inferiority are usually feelings of fear and guilt, also unconscious – a fear of the world, which the owner has never been allowed to face with a feeling of courage or adequacy, and a feeling of guilt that is, perhaps, the natural enough consequence of a lack of love for strict parents, or the envy of others more fortunate.  

Repressed feelings of fear and guilt…are potent factors in self destruction, he continued. ‘Inferiority Complexes, with their attendant unconscious fears and guilt, are also self destructive’. A chapter on dreams summarises Freud’s theory of the unconscious – about wishes, desires fantasies and symbolization before proceeding to look at unconscious processes in marriage as couple navigate the birth of children, parenthood and the cycle of life.

McRae, however, seems to have all the answers – his version of psychoanalytic theory and dream interpretation is somewhat reductive – along the lines of ‘this means this and that is equal to that. Even if he is trying to get his readers to think afresh about behavior and experience, beyond conscious apprehension.

In analytical work I find that many women feel that the change of life has robbed them of the very essence of womanhood, for few of them are well enough adjusted to realise that their period of usefulness is by no means over when they are no longer able to bear children. Psychologically, this accounts for many of the difficulties which many women experience when the change of life looms ahead of them, for these conflicts set up sorts of nervous reactions. Such women unconsciously resent the passage of time, and often nervous anxieties produce sleeplessness, which may be related to a fear of growing old and dying. This explains what adolescent daughters often find their mothers so trying, for their young charm and freshness intensify the mother’s jealousy, which is unconscious, but finds apparently legitimate reasons to express itself. 

Reception of The Psychology of Nervousness was  lukewarm. It was noted in the press across Australia  particularly in Western Australia. It was  warmly recommended to readers by the editor of the ‘problem page’ in Perth’s Daily News. The editors of the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, far north Queensland was somewhat more direct.  The Psychology of Nervousness was ‘the least convincing’ of McRae’s three books on everyday psychology, they wrote.

The general reader is rightly cautious about disagreeing with experienced opinion in such matters as this book deals with, but he will be hard put to find support from his own knowledge for many of the claims this writer makes. The manifestations of the unconscious mind seem altogether too wayward and remote, and while it may be granted that the unconscious mind, at times, works in anything but a logical way and is a latent influence exerting great effect on an individual’s life, the layman feels that psychologists tend to resort too frequently to the unconscious mind for explanation of certain types of human behaviour. The reason quite often may he a purely physiological one or at least a combination of body chemistry and mind. It may all amount to a question of first cause and that is a great field for argument.

Perhaps McRae’s analysis too reductive  for them.

The general reader falls into this line of thought when he reads that if a child is thrashed for stealing he thenceforward unconsciously looks for and feels the need of punishment whenever he commits theft again. Again: “There have been few “perfect crimes’ because the culprit usually leaves a clue which proves his undoing. He unconsciously desires punishment, so makes a little error in order to be detected.” This seems to endow people with an extraordinarily high ethical sense and to discount the force of self preservation.

Perhaps, the editors suggested, it was better to let things lie even if they were interested in McRae’s chapter on shell-shock and war neurosis and hysterical conversion symptoms.

One valuable advance in psychology has been the demonstration of how internal conflict can affect the organs of the body and produce disease. Mc Rae’s observations on the subject are highly interesting. We can understand that when a conflict is solved the Individual finds life more harmonious and that he gains in physical and mental health but conflicts seem to he part of the price of man’s existence and they must have had considerable influence on the progress of the world. How much do art and science owe to discords of mind?

McRae had faced such objections before. In his final chapter he stands by his position.

I do not require that it should completely satisfy the philosopher and the aesthete. I know that it works, that it heals the sick and comforts the weary, and that, because of this, must be right. If its concepts offend some, the answer that I give them is not an elaborate justification, but a simple indication of someone who has been cured, someone who has been made happier.

He then describes what is involved in an analysis… explaining the notion of the transference, free associations, dreaming and the negative transference – and matters concerning length of treatment, and the costs.

Sadly William McRae does not make the gallery of psychoanalytic pioneers, the subjects of the exhibition, Inner Worlds, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra during 2011.  I wonder though, how many people struggling with their particular daemons and personal pains found something of relevance, and direction in his books? How many people sought treatment as a result?  A year later in 1943 Mcrae’s public lecture series on psychoanalysis for the University of Western Australia drew an enrolment of 297…

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