Category Archives: WW2

‘They could not take my soul’…Lydia Tischler 2017 – and inpatient psychoanalytic treatment.

29 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Children in Hospital, Inpatient treatment, WW2

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The British based child psychotherapist, Lydia Tischler, is an editor of the classic text: The Family as In-Patient: Working with Families and Adolescents at the Cassel Hospital. The Cassel Hospital in Kingston upon Thames, was originally established for the treatment of shell shock patients during the Great War. Under the directorship of psychiatrist Tom Main who developed the practice of psychosocial nursing, the work evolved into psychoanalytically orientated inpatient treatment of families. 

Tischler and her group also had an effect in Melbourne, Australia. During the late 1980s the Melbourne Clinic in Richmond in Melbourne under the directorship of Dr Brian Muir, a psychoanalyst, who came from Britain and the Cassel Hospital for the job. He was the head of the adolescent and family unit there during the 1970s.  Joan Christie then the Clinic’s Director of Nursing, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, was also involved. Patients with multiple and complex problems can need the supportive structure of the hospital in their psychotherapeutic journey. At least for a time. Some people with complex presentations cannot be worked with without such support. Their emotional world, so fractured by early, and accidental experiences, requires the consistency and availability of a safe secure environment.  As Marion Milner noted in her book, ‘The Hands of the Living God, an account of the analysis of a woman lasting more than twenty years, psychoanalytic treatment can enable the living of a productive life. Otherwise means a considerable demand on the public purse. It is one part of a complex policy debate over treatment efficacy, evidence and as others have pointed out, the reluctance of psychoanalysis to represent itself. 

The workings of the Melbourne Clinic project and the factors contributing to its ending are matters for historical research. I get the impression, at least as far as my memory goes, that this was an exciting and hopeful moment for psychoanalytic practice in this country. Why it ceased I do not know. 

These musings and  memories surfaced at the moment when I discovered Lydia Tischler’s interview online. Published in 2017 she speaks of her early life, the family’s arrest by the Nazis and the loss of her mother. Mengele’s nod to the right was enough to seal Lydia’s mother’s fate. Lydia Tischler was nodded to the right.

‘They could not take my soul’, she says.

Here is this most moving of interviews.   https://youtu.be/3lpTceEE3d8

A refugee is seeking a new home: Ilse Hellmann’s appeal, 10 June 1939.

26 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in History of Child Guidance, WW2

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I would be very grateful to you if you would be kind enough to give me some idea of the possible chances for me to find work..either in connection with a children’s clinic, or in a child welfare centre, training college, nusery school etc (Ilse Hermann to Christine Heinig, 10 June 1939).

On 10 June 1939 the Viennese child psychologist Ilse Hellmann wrote  to an American colleague Christine Heinig, appealing for help to emigrate to Australia. Eighteen months earlier Heinig had taken up the post Principal of the Melbourne Kindergarten Training College. Hellmann, aged 30, an Austrian Jew from Vienna was  working  in London as  the co-director at Charlotte Buhler’s Parents’Institute of Psychology for Subnormal Children in Rowland Gardens, in Kensington.

Hellmann was on her own. Buhler had first fled Austria for London after the Anchluss  in March 1938. She subsquently immigrated to the United States after her husband, imprisoned in Oslo for his anti Nazi stand, was released in October 1938. Nor could she return to Austria. After Kristallnacht on 11 November 1938  the Nazis  had  decreed that Jews could to leave Germany for any country for which they had an entry visa. But Britain  closed its borders to European Jewish males. Women and children were accepted provided the women took up employment in service. Hellmann was one of the luckier ones. Already working in London it was, for her, a matter of finding another place to go should she not be able to remain.

At the time she wrote to Heinig  Members of Hellmann`s family were immigrating to Australia. Records from the National Archives of Australia show that Ernst Richard Hellmann together with his wife, Anne Marie and daughter Christine Ilse, had been issued with a passport from the German Embassy in London and were awaiting an entry visa for Australia. Ernst Richard Hellmann had found sponsorship from a grazier Douglas Caird Campbell in Gunnedah, New South Wales. He would be working on 4000 acres property.

Hellmann’s letter was passed on to fellow American, psychiatrist Dr Anita Muhl who had arrived in Melbourne for a two year consultancy in child and adult psychology less than nine months before. Sponsored by philanthropist Una Cato, Muhl had had to find her way into local medical, psychiatric and psychology circles, building trust well enough for her expertise to be sought.  She fowarded Hellmann`s letter to a State government body, the Victorian Council for Mental Hygiene writing,

 

I think the only thing I can do is ask certain members of the Council…to say what you think her chances are of finding work here… You will see that her letter is dated 10th June 1939, but Miss Heinig tells me that the outbreak of war has only made Miss Hellmann more anxious to come to Australia.

The reply, dated 6 November 1939, was kindly if not entirely encouraging. There was room and need for the sort of person you are mentioning. Indeed we have another fine Viennese here at present, Mrs Lacerta Finton who has spendid training and experience.*

If there was any suggestion or reply to Hellmann this has not been found.

At the moment Anita Muhl received Hellmann’s letter the  Australian government was  organizing its response to the refugee crisis. Of the Dominions New Zealand did not accept any refugees; Canada and South Africa both accepted a limited number. In Australia after the  former Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce, then  High Commissioner in London,  recommended that Australia take 30,000 refugees. The government halved the number advising the High Commissioner on 1st December 1939 that Australia would accept 15,000. We do not know whether Hellman’s request reached the Department of Interior.

In the end Hellmann did not immigrate to Australia. She commenced training as a psychoanalyst in 1942,  became an associate member of the British Pychoanalytical Society in 1945 and a full member in 1952. From 1955 she was a leading figure in the Anna Freudian Group. Her letter to her colleague in Australia reflects the desperation of the thousands if not millions of dispossessed people seeking sancturary from the terrors of Nazism.

 

*Maria Lacerta Finton, also Austrian,  had arrived in Melbourne on the 25th September 1939. She subsequently worked as a nurse at the Royal Women’s Hospital and, from 1958 to 1968 at the Victoria’s Social Welfare Department.

References:

Letter from Ilse Hellmann to Christine Heinig, 10 June 1939;Reply from Director, Victorian Council for Mental Hygiene, 6 November 1939; Dr Anita Muhl, Correspondence, 1939-1941,  Box 1766/2, State Library of Victoria, Australia.

Louise London (2000), Whitehall and the Jews, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Hellmann, Ernst Richard, NAA: A12508/21/1849, National Archives of Australia, http://www.naa.gov.au

 

Miss L’s Dream Diary – Seeking ‘Dr W’.

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in 1940s, Diaries and Source material, Refugees, WW2

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Once in a while in the business of researching and writing history a rare document emerges from the archive boxes. Such items are the products of serendipity; the result of a decision made by their author, or someone, that it should be preserved. Writing in the 1940s, the French Historian and then member of the Resistance, Marc Bloch, drew my attention to such moments. The archives we rely upon for historical understanding are built from such off-the-cuff decisions and accidents – and from the systematic collation of records that are part of bureaucratic life. To read the thoughts and ideas of people who were alive in times past is  to read of our formation. These thoughts and dreams, however recorded, are the beginning of understanding. Poetry, novels, theatre and art are their interpretation. So, too, is the writing of history.

Recently I was given a box of documents collated and packed by an elderly woman, whom I shall call ‘Miss L’. She has since gone into full-time care, her mind lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. It is clear Miss L thought carefully about what was to be kept and what was thrown away. Along with the usual documents: degrees, certificates, bank records, letters and photographs there are two diaries – both kept during the 1940s when she was consulting a psychoanalyst in London. One of them follows the course of her consultations with the analyst, referred to as ‘Dr W’. The other is a dream diary, a record of nightly dreams kept during this period. Most of these dreams hold  images of her daily life and interactions with members of her family and lovers. Others are threaded with images of death and violence at the hands of the Nazis in the years before the war broke out. In others, still, she is addressing ‘Him’, her analyst, on one occasion admonishing him for not listening. Sometimes she makes a joke of him, wondering whether psychoanalysis is of value – at least to the patient. Miss L has a story to tell and conflicts to unravel. She wants and needs him to listen.

Miss L is a German Jew. During her childhood she lived near Nuremberg, the youngest of a wealthy family. Her father, a merchant, had fought in the Great War and was awarded the Iron Cross for his services. Like many of his Jewish contemporaries who were similarly awarded, he believed this would protect him from the worst excesses of the Nazis as they came to power in the 1930s. Five days after Kristallnacht in November 1938, Miss L’s father took his own life. She and her mother escaped Germany early in 1939, eventually arriving in England after travelling through Switzerland.

Miss L’s dream diary reflects her larger internal process of emigration and resettlement, from danger to safety. She speaks to her analyst of leaving one country behind but, after several years, still not settled in another. Her dreams are of murder and death. It is not unlikely she was witness to such events, if she did not hear about them from others. She also dreams of losing her identity documents on a train a reference, perhaps, to a period where she was stateless.

After her arrival in London she  experienced rejection by members of the English Jewish community because of her German origins. ‘I was not served in a shop, she tells her analyst.  In later life she recalled how much more devastated she was by this rejection by the English Jews than she had been in Germany during the years when Jews were increasingly deprived of their rights, property and wealth. Miss L eventually anglicised her name and worked hard to become British – even more so than the British. She appears to have been very much helped by Dr W. For it was after her work with him that she went to university to study for a career that would help restore the family fortune lost to the war. Miss L did not necessarily aspire to Law but eventually made a significant contribution to it.

During her analysis with Dr W, Miss L recorded her dreams on a daily basis throughout 1944 into 1945. I will transcribe two: the first because it tells us just how much she had to bear. These were the experiences and memories from which she tried to protect her children. Earlier in the analysis she had dreamed of being told not to speak. But in her conscious selection of this document for the archive box, she has I believe, expressed the wish that these experiences be known. When I read this dream, I wept.

When I read the second dream for the first time I had the feeling I had read it somewhere before. Perhaps in a case study somewhere deep in the psychoanalytic literature…? I record it now because if I am right, this may identify Dr W. Perhaps someone else has read it, remembers it and may know where it has been published. Or perhaps I have imagined reading it.  Suffice to say it is Miss L’s dream.

Dream 1. Tues 2 May 1945.

[Two girls] have offended against some rule of their school and I am told they will both be executed for it. I think it is monstrous. I want to tell everybody about this and do something against it, but I  hear the headmistress did not waste a minute, and they are already dead. I meet a man who worked in my father’s office and he is coming from the execution. I go up to him and start crying but try not to. I say to him ‘I am sorry. I did not mean to cry, but this is just too much’.  I go out to see [a lady], she must be in despair [I think]. The girls were the only thing she had in life. I find her together with some other women each of whom has lost a son. She is quite calm. They all talk about their children.

Dream 2. Sunday 20 May 1945

Mother says we are going to buy some black material for a dress for me at a certain shop in Nuremberg. I am rather thrilled. I haven’t bought any material for years. I leave the house and walk along a street in Nuremberg. There is a beautiful warm shine of light from [ a building she names but is indecipherable]. Before it was bombed the light never shone right through. It is lovelier than ever.

Round the church and the street there are rows of dead bodies of American soldiers. Some are wrapped up in brown paper and string, they must be really dead. One who was lying against a house opposite the church gets up and shows me the way to the shops and I talk to him. I remember that I never told mother I was going out but when I get near the shop I meet her and my aunt with a man in a dark uniform. He has very dark deep set eyes and a rather taut face. He seems much more interesting to me than my guide , who is rather fat and jovial.

The War had ended on 8 May 1945.

References:

Marc Bloch,( c.1944).  The Historians Craft, Oxford, 1971.

Louise London, (2000) Whitehall and the Jews, Oxford, Oxford University Press.