Category Archives: western australia

Pedagogic Psychoanalysis – Summerhill

16 Sunday Oct 2011

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Neill on his birthday

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In the book,  ‘A Dominie in Doubt” Mr A S Neill has more to say about those novel educationalist theories which he has expounded in several irritating and suggestive books”. Thus began a critique publisjed by the Sydney Morning Herald  on 25 December 1920. Neill’s ideas appeared to be ‘outrageous’, the journalist continued.

“His idea is, briefly, fo let a child’ learn what it likes and do what it likes. He believes that in this way better results will be obtained in the long, run than by coercion, for the child will be able to develop individuality. Punishment is tabu; discipline, self imposed. Mr Neill favours the introduction of a sort of Soviet system; let the classes govern themselves’.

Very soon, he says,

a community spirit and  sense of  responsibility will grow; these youthful protagonists will maintain order themselves and will have no mercy on the offender. The boycott, It appears, is the usual penalty for misbehaviour. But if the plan is to succeed the autonomy must be real and not nominal. If the schoolmaster stands as the power in the background, reserving to himself the ultimate right to intervene, the experiment will be disastrous’

A S Neill may not have been an Australian – although that hardly mattered to Herald readers. Happenings in England were often reported in the Australian press as if it was local news. A S Neill’s view, drawn from the work of Freud and August Aichhorn, founder of the first child guidance clinic in Vienna during the 1920s, was that children should be free to develop according to their own inner compulsions. In 1920 Neill was in the process of founding a progressive school, ‘Summerhill‘, in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden. Its principles were ‘democratic’. Children had the right to decide whether to attend lessons, whether to play and what to learn. Very soon after its opening, Neill became disillusioned, forming the view that the school was being  run by idealists.  They ‘disapproved of tobacco, foxtrots and cinemas’, he said. He wanted the children to live their own lives:

Summerhill School I am only just realising the absolute freedom of my scheme of Education. I see that all outside compulsion is wrong, that inner compulsion is the only value. And if Mary or David wants to laze about, lazing about is the one thing necessary for their personalities at the moment. Every moment of a healthy child’s life is a working moment. A child has no time to sit down and laze. Lazing is abnormal, it is a recovery, and therefore it is necessary when it exists. Summerhill School

In 1923 Neill moved the school to England; first to a house called ‘Summerhill’ in Lyme Regis and from there to Leiston in the County of Suffolk where it has just celebrated the 90th anniversary of its founding. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/aug/19/summerhill-school-at-90?INTCMP=SRCH

Why put this all on a page about psychoanalysis in an Australian context? Well first, Freud’s ideas were becoming more widely known – at least amongst middle class educated people; readers or regular attenders at meetings of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and Psychology. Neill’s ideas were drawn from Freud’s  and Reich’s notions of the developing ego within the child as he or she mastered their more primitive impulses as they grew and developed. His belief was that given a secure and respectful setting, the child would find their own pathway to development in a positive way, rather than repressing the true self as an adaptation to the demands and constraints of the adult world.

Freud’s ideas were moving beyond his small circle of followers, were being taken up by people who found in his work an echo of their own thinking. Neill’s was an exciting experiment and, if the students who passed through his school are to be believed ( and why not?) a successul one.

 

 

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Reading ‘Insanity in the Archive’.

16 Sunday Oct 2011

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For her PhD thesis, New Zealand based historian Catharine Coleborne, examined archival records from Asylums for the Insane at Yarra Bend Hospital in Melbourne. Colbourne’s focus was on the way gender was represented in patient records. She ‘focused on the ways in which textual representations of madness produced ideas about the illness, and specifically, how gender was used as a mode of asylum classification and organisation’.

Colborne’s interest in the discourse that emerges from within patient records has led her to expand her research. As she explains in her article published in the Public Records Office of Victoria’s refereed journal ‘Provenance’, this covers

four different mental hospitals in Australia and New Zealand between 1860 and 1914. These public institutions were the Yarra Bend Asylum/Hospital for the Insane (established 1848), Gladesville Hospital for the Insane (1869), Goodna Mental Hospital (1865) and Auckland Hospital for the Insane (1853). Asylum archives – in particular, patient case records and ancillary
materials – located at PROV, State Records New South Wales (Western Sydney Records
Centre), Queensland State Archives (Brisbane) and National Archives of New Zealand (Auckland
Branch). 

The NATURE of the archive is the primary matter for inquiry. Rather than being a source of ‘historical fact’, historical interrogation concerns the nature of the record itself.  What is included, left out, or considered a matter for comment is significant. Who was writing? What were their interests? Their agenda? The writer of any document is always making a choice about what to record and what to leave out – I think. As the French historian, Marc Bloch points out in his last book, The Historian’s Craft, written in 1944 when he was working for the Resistance, ( he was subsequently executed by the Nazis), it is the subjectivity of the record keeper that must be scrutinized. The historian works on the borders between anthropology, sociology and psychology. For Bloch, the nature of human consciousness is under scrutiny – individually, collectively and within the historian herself.

Part of the work of the historian is to find entry into the emotional culture of a time past… to find a way to apprehend and to interpret that past while  at the same time recognising one’s particular subjectivity as a member of the current culture.The emotional resonance of these records  for the historian  matters much. It is a type of ‘transference’  to use the psychoanalytic term. A historian responds according to the meanings, or the lenses she has developed as a member of her contemporary external and internal world. For Colborne, I suspect,  losing objectivity is contentious. At the very least it could be faulty history.  She writes of her struggle to maintain distance – to hold herself as a historian; to continue to theorise even as she reads others’ recordings of severe distress, if not suicide. This is important if we are to make sense of the historical milieu where her subjects move. But to remove the ‘I’ completely, to eschew discussion of the personal reaction and how this may prompt further interrogation risks diminshing exploration and recognition of the subjective world of past people.  It is a tricky business though. How do we try to understand what it means to be another person in another time?

 

REFERENCES:

Catharine Colborne, ‘Reading Insanity’s Archive: Reflections from Four Archival Sites’, in Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria, September 2010, Number 9;

URL://www.prov.vic.gov.au/provenance/no9/readinginsanityPrint.asp (accessed 5 October 2011).

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Oxford University Press, 1944.

Ivy Bennett in London 1946

01 Saturday Oct 2011

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In 1945 Ivy Bennett won the very prestigious ‘British Council’ Scholarship enabling her to travel to England to study whatever she wished. Her plan was to study child psychology. At the request of her mentor in Australia, Mr Foster, she wrote a long letter reporting on life in London with a view to preparing the next scholarship winner. Londoners were in the early stages of recovery after a long, long war which had finally ended nine months beforehand.  Ivy Bennett’s  letter was dated 16 March 1946.* Let’s ‘listen’ to her impressions.

In the first place conditions are not as bad as I had been led to expect.In many ways there are a lot of things in shops etc. which we have not been able to get in Australia for years. In other ways the position is very difficult. This applies to all forms of “service” especially transport, accommodation and shopping. All the mechanics of living and getting about are very strenuous and time-consuming; much of London is still running under emergency conditions of staffing etc. and there is very great weariness and fatigue in all the working people.Accommodation is a difficult problem with so much desolation and wreckage everywhere – and such limited staff and skeleton organisation....London is very shabby and grimy and only her essential services operate fully, so that the ordinary person finds life very strenuous. One queues for hours everywhere.

The universities were in chaos. Staffing was low. Experienced teachers were hard to find and demand, intense.

London is so full of foreign students – Poles, Chinese, Dutch, French, South American, Jewish, Turkish, that one is expected to work pretty independently, at least at first. All the postgraduate classes I have seen are terribly overcrowded, carrying on under all kinds of difficult working conditions, and individual supervision is quite impossible.

Day-to-day life was ‘strenuous’.  Getting around was hard and clothing nigh impossible to obtain.

I think it will help the next student if [they] remember that London is very shabby and grimy, the soap ration (3 small cakes per person per month for all purposes: household, bath, washing) quite inadequate and all normal laundry services disrupted so that utility factors come first in clothing. Life is very strenuous in London and one’s clothes have to be very comfortable and durable. [The woman scholarship holder] would be wise to equip herself with a full wardrobe in Australia as shopping is very difficult in London, the dressmaking position hopeless and the rationing very severe. I received 10 coupons from my arrival until May, but was fortunate enough in having been given a special grant of 66 coupons to spend in Western Australia on the grounds I was the ambassador for Australian wool! This helped me a lot and I think the next student would be wise to work on the assumption that there is no clothing in England of any description that she can get or is worth getting, and come supplied with winter underclothing and weather-proof clothing, and as full a wardrobe as she can manage. 

One’s best investment is a really good weather-proof top coat – one wears it constantly. Shoes are also hard to get in London – especially good walking shoes. I should be extravagant about shoes and coats if I were planning again. And I’d also get a supply of knitted gloves and scarves in wool – one wears them all the time and kid gloves are never warm.

London is in a chaotic state. eg I can’t use an electtric iron because an incendiary bomb wrecked the wiring of this house four years ago, and as yet there has been no labour to fix it so one is wise to omit the frills and crisp white collars and go in for silk and wool – something which is warm, does not need constant pressing and can be worn under the continual top-coat. Australian winter suits can be worn almost all the year round here…

It is a good idea to arrange to have someone in Australia send parcels of foodstuffs occasionally so that you can go armed with a tin of honey, jam, treacle, sugar, sweets, butter, cheese of meat from Australia. Tea is not short over here. What most people like is some sort of fat, protein food (not canned fish) or something sweet. Personally I find food rationing adequate but to the English after 6 years, it has become very dull and monotonous. They have been living on extracts and powders and condensed foods for so long that plain tinned foods, especially meats, milk and sugar – are precious rubies to them. A tin of condensed milk when added to the eternal semolina packets, will make dessert for a whole family.

* University of Western Australia: UWA Archives Cons 507

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‘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.