On Saving Freud From the Nazis.

25 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in Freud in London

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It is rather widely known that Freud and his family escaped from Nazi Germany in 1938 after intense lobbying by the Psychoanalyst, Ernest Jones. There was some delay when Freud’s visa was turned down by the Nazis but clearly most of the family made it out of the place, arrived in England and settled in the Hampstead/ Camden/Belsize Park area. It appears that at this time other Jewsih families who made it out of Germany settled there too. My husband’s grandmother was one of them.

It has been interesting to observe that Freud’s journey from Germany to England was followed closely by the Australian Press.  Psychoanalysis by 1938 had assumed such a significant place in Australian culture. The name ‘Freud’ was significant enough for readers to care enough to follow the proposal to rescue Freud, but experienced the uncertainty of the project, the alarm and panic that he might not make it and the relief and joy that he did. His progress is recorded in a  series of cables republished published in newspapers from places as far afield as Broken Hill, Cairns and Kalgoorlie as well as the state capital cities as it happened. The Nazis could have stopped Freud at the last minute. But perhaps they let him through because they were not ready for war. Yet. A year later after war had been declared there was the delight, after Freud’s death on 25th September 1939, when it was discovered that the family had tricked the Nazis and smuggled their money, books and chattels too. Anything that revealed the weakness of the Nazi regime was to be eagerly consumed.

It is easy to gloss over the other story – about the failure of the British, the French and other nations to recognise and act upon the dire situation facing German Jews at this time, particularly after Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. Jewish people were told by the authorities they could leave the country- provided they could gain visas from their destination country. Almost impossible. During the Evian Conference called during the summer months of 1938 by President Roosevelt, delegates from thirty two countries rose to express sympathy for the German Jews but upheld refugee quotas set in 1924.

During the days following Kristallnacht the Manchester Guardian reported a run on the British and American Embassies by Jewish people seeking visas out of the country. They were knocked back. Perhaps students were allowed out; perhaps women and children or people who had relatives in other places. It appears that men were refused visas. There is a small body of literature about this including Louise London’s 2001 book, Whitehall and the Jews published by Cambridge University Press and Martin Gilbert’s Kristallnachtfrom where I gathered the information about the refusal to issue visas in the days that followed.

Freud was an exception, a special case – along with a few others. Those who did not get out eventually perished in the death camps. One was not to know that then. Obviously Ernest Jones was a skilled operator and hard worker who acted in desperate, desperate times, lobbying a government reluctant to act if not crippled with intransigence and fears of the economic burden and impact of a large number of refugees. ( It is a familiar story). There is, of course, the Kindertransporte, the rescue of thousands of Jewish children from Germany; an event heroic in itself but which blurs the deeper complexity of the relationship between the British and other Governments with a people facing almost certain death from people they had once regarded as their countrymen. The betrayal is huge: we can see this now.

Half a world away, in the Antipodes, Jones’s work was not only applauded but resulted in the development of the Australian psychoanalytic scene through the 1940 arrival in Melbourne of Hungarian woman Clara Geroe who became Australia’s first training analyst and, in Sydney Bondi Peto, also from Hungary. Had Jones not been successful, of course, Freud and Anna Freud as well as the rest of the family may well have perished – along with others who were also able to  migrate through his efforts. What other talent that perished we will not know.

The Meaning of Fairyland

20 Sunday Nov 2011

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Look at them, troll mother said. Look at my so...

Mother Trolls: Image via Wikipedia

There is very little information about New Zealander, Jean Mather, author of the article, ‘The Unconscious Meaning of Fairyland’ published n two parts in the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. At this time she was an Associate of the Department of Psychology at Wellington University.  She appears been a kindergarten teacher during the 1920s. Newspaper items refer to her interest in fairy stories. She constructed little plays for children to perform. In this article she took on a mammoth task: to  examine the meaning of   European myths – fairy stories – and their relationship with the developing mind of the child.

Here, I will trace  the main thread of Mather’s articles, as she deftly links internal unconscious processes with their collective expression in myths and legends. Mather  is respectful of Freud but like Jung and Adler disputes his thesis that childhood sexuality is at the centre of development. Noting  Freud’s recognition of the ‘remarkable similarity which exists between the myths of primitive man and the dreams and phantasies of civilised persons’. ( Mather 1933: I), Mather used the  work of two of Freud’s former associates Jung and Adler. Both were unconvinced by Freud’s theories of childhood sexuality. While this had been worked out by members of Freud’s Wednesday group -Abraham (Dream and Myth), Otto Rank ( The Myth and the Birth of the Hero) and Riklin ( Wish Fulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales), Mather preferred Adler’s notions of the ‘inferior personality’ and Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypal psychology to frame her understanding of children’s development. The meaning of fairytales is intertwined with psychic development.

Understanding ‘Fairyland’ to be a metaphor for psychic processes, Mather begins by describing it as a retreat, against growth and the development of independence.  Always Fairyland is  portrayed as a beautiful and  enchanted place where miracles occur, she says. It is paradise and it is also the land of the dead. On may visit but should a mortal eat the magic food is eaten by a mortal ‘he usually becomes captive in the enchanted land and can never return home’.  Mather cites Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem,  ‘Passing of Arthur’  describing the place to which Arthur, seriously wounded, intends to make the journey…to the

.…..island valley of Avilion; Where falls not hail, or rain, or wind or snow,Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows, crowned with summer seas.

Fairyland is usually reached across valleys, over rivers or through climbing a mountain. Often it is reached by passing through a secret door, perhaps a hole in the ground. There is no restriction on time, Mather continues. Time does not exist. A day may be a thousand years. ‘The dead sleep on, heedless of the flight of ages’. Fairyland is a retreat to a place before conflict and difficulties began; it is a place where all wishes are fulfilled. She continues:

‘Fairies are not the spirits of the dead, but of the living, being personified projections of our own thoughts and feelings. In fact it is this dual character ( about life and death) that gives real clue to its deepest significance’.

Interestingly Mather omits the final line from Tennyson’s verse: ‘Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. Arthur,wounded in battle against physicalenemies and by the psychological projections, jealousies and rivalries of others, seeks retreat, hoping to heal and repair his wounds.

Death and renewal are constant themes in European myths and legends.One of the most universal: that of the sun-god setting in the west, dying in the west to be renewed and reborn in the eastern skies  in the morning. Easter celebrates the cycle of the death and the resurrection in biblical terms; the death of winter and the renewal that comes with spring. Mather wrote:

The sun every evening is immersed in the maternal water, often being threatened by dangers of all kinds, and is born again renewed in the morning. In many cases as, for example, the myth of Osiris, the hero is enclosed in a chest or ark for his journey across the sea; an inversion of the natural fact that the child floats in the amniotic fluid and that this is in the uterus. The chest or box here is a symbol of the mother’s womb, as is the monster by which the hero is swallowed.

Meadow Elves

 

In Fairyland time passes in a flash. The return to reality is marked, often, by recognition that life has gone by without one, that one has long been forgotten. Sometimes the voyager is able to restore he life on earth. Often he crumbles away to nothing after eating mortal food.  It is the end of omnipotence, maybe? In therapy or analysis the wish to ‘begin all over again’, may refer to a place before it all began, to a desire to return to the womb.For Mather this is not about  fears of incest – a view derived from a Freudian perspective but concerns the real love for the parents by the child which does not have sexual connotations in Mather’s view, until the child begins to mature. More particularly  it is

‘some difficulty or conflict of the present moment, and that, in seeking the cause in the distant past, one is following the desire of the individual to withdraw himself as far as possible from his present perplexity or his present task

The outcome here, a regressive move, causes re-animation of childish adaptations with the result that

Elaborate dreams and phantasies are then produced, as forms of compensation for the unfulfill ed adaptation to reality’ but their sexual content is only apparently expressive of an incest wish, being a regressive employment of sexual forms to express a need in a symbolical way.

These articles give a good analysis of the ways a troubled person may seek to cope – to withdraw into an underground world where nothing touches one – it is believed. It is linked with the growth from infant time when all wishes were satisfied to the present where frustrations and obstacles are part of everyday living.It is the result of conflict… not creativity – a wish to return to the state  ‘before’ rather than ”after’ or ‘now’.

The extraverts that Jung writes of may see the world as a positive place. They have not suffered serious setback while the ‘introvert’ feels the world to be a dangerous place. These are the people who may wander into ‘fairyland’ where they hope that the work of redemption might be done.  But tragically for many, the return to the mortal world comes far too late. Time has passed; friends and associates have moved on. One may be left behind. The taste of mortal food breaks the spell. The “child” falls down dead.

Or is it childish phantasy that dies? Does this symbolise the breakdown we have already had – the event that caused the retreat in the first place? It appears that Mather turns to the earliest days of infant life and the relationship between infant and mother when she writes:

It is not surprising that in fairy tales those who are stolen away by the fairies or who wander into fairyland are…persons in whom definite feelings of inferiority may be assumed to exist. It is extremely significant that there should be a widespread superstition that newborns must be protected against the perils of their condition but also against fairies and other supernatural beings which are always on the watch to seize and carry them off if they are left unguarded, leaving in their place one of the fairy folk, or a block of wood made to resemble the stolen child.

One wonders whether these fairy stories are, in fact, describing the plight and response of an abandoned child, a child where bonding between mother and child is broken down.

But the seeking of treasure and reward in fairyland is to seek a worthless solution. ‘It is the treasure of phantasy and dream, Mather writes. It is ‘very precious to the regressive element in man’s nature. but worthless rubbish to the progressive, onward looking aspect of the libido’. It is a bondage that must be overcome – and can only be done by rebellion against the conditions set forth for life in paradise.

It is only by the doing of “evil” that a knowledge of good and evil can be attained, and the primary unmorality and thoughtless irresponsibility of childhood can be destroyed. The “War With Evil” enters in to disrupt the original harmony of life and one’s actions must be no longer instinctive, but the result of conscious deliberation and choice.

We all yearn for fairyland, it seems. We yearn for the golden days of childhood innocence and freedom from responsibility. We have an awareness of ‘paradise lost’ and seek the indulgence reserved for children.  The voyage to fairyland is the opportunity to rework old conflicts and to re-emerge afresh having resisted the temptation to eat the ‘magic food’ of the immortals and thus stay in the magic world of unreality – forever.

With multiple examples drawn from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Andrew Lang’s collection in his Fairy Books, among others, Mather traces variations in fairy stories to illustrate her point. Fairy stories are not just an expression of internal conflict she concludes, but embody a process of working things out at a deeply unconscious level. All of us have out own personal project: to relinquish the shackles of childhood paradise and to make our way in the world.

Jean Mather, MA, ‘The Unconscious Significance of Fairyland’, in Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, Vol 11, Issue 4, December 1933, pages 258-274; AND: Volume 12, Issue 1, March 1934, pages 16-32.

Distance Psychoanalysis

20 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in Communication Technology and Psychoanalysis

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In his book, Distance Psychoanalysis, Brazilian Psychoanalyst Ricardo Carlino argues for the integration of communication technology into psychoanalytic method. By now an entire generation has been brought up in a social milieu where digital technology is the norm.  Baby Boomers who thought they ruled the world are now ‘digital immigrants’. They hold in their minds a history of psychoanalytic practice based on close physical proximity between patient and analyst ( ie in the same room). Yet, like the current generation, they face the challenges and changes wrought by the internet, the world-wide web and electronic communication.  Psychoanalytic practitioners need to explore the way this will impact upon practice and to develop a framework within which they could practice. In the longer term, Carlino argues, communication technology will enable people living in remote regions to get access to this and other treatments.

It’s an interesting – and important – idea and one I will be exploring in more detail as I work my way through Carlino’s book. For the time being, though, I will leave you with this article from today’s online edition of the Australian daily, ‘The Age’, showing just how deeply modern communication technology has altered the world.

Ricardo Carlino, Distance Psychoanalysis: Theory and Practice of Using Communication Technology In The Clinic, London, Karnac Books, 2011.

Pedagogic Psychoanalysis – Summerhill

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in educational theory, western australia

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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

Posted by in Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, western australia

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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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Explorations in Oceania

30 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by in Anthropology and Colonialism

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As much as anything Freud’s theories emerged duirng those centuries when Europeans and Indigenous peoples were engaged in an encounter which effectively altered the way each thought about their particular cosmos. It is not unlikely that Freud’s urging that psychoanalysis  be spread across the globe reflected this broader move – although, I think, applying European notions of the Oedipus Conflict to cultures whose structuring and conceptualisation of family and social relationships were so different, was missing the point, rather.

However in my desktop explorations of the blogosphere I have found this series of links to museum collections of oceanic art objects.  Relics of the colonial period such items were brought back by explorers of the region.

The historian, Greg Dening, wrote of ‘crossing the beaches’ – crossing that no-man’s land between the known and unknown world. When one is a visitor in a country and culture other than one’s own one is always negotiating gaps in understanding about what is assumed to be so, or not. Eighteenth century European explorers were tourists as well as inveterate collectors, if not pilferers and plunderers of other cultures. Perhaps the essential ‘otherness’ of such cultural artifacts also affirmed the explorers’ essential European-ness as well as generating much anxiety about and apprehension about what was civilised and what was not.

The ‘Number 1 Delinquent Factory’ and Other Matters ..

22 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in Psychology Training - History, University of Western Australia Archives

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Newsy letters home can provide moments of unguarded observation – and for historians, a snapshot of a particular social mentalite. In  December 1943 Ivy Bennett, then an assistant lecturer in psychology at University of Western Australia, was visiting New South Wales on a study tour – to look at institutional care for state children and to visit the Psychology Department at the University of Sydney.She had just been awarded a Master of Arts for her study of the social behaviour of pre-school children.  Her letter to her boss, Professor Robert Fowler, head of Psychology at the University of Western Australia, reveals not just a facility for acerbic observation, but clear grasp of the  psychology discipline – and trenchant criticism of the state of teaching and practice amongst her New South Wales colleagues. The letter is dated 12 December 1943. (UWA Archives Cons 507).

On her arrival in Sydney after a long flight over Ivy visited several government institutions housing state children – comparable to those back in Western Australia. She recounted,

I don’t know whether you know any of these but I have been to NSW’s No.1 Delinquent Factory, the Girls Industrial School at Parramatta, which is a shocking place, full of 100 16 and 15 year olds with hair dyed blonde or red, a common ambition to either work in a milk-bar or go to Long Bay Prison, and a joint hatred for work, respectability and the barn-like conditions under which they live. It gave  me much food for thought.

Ivy also visited ‘May Villa’ and ‘Castle Hill’, institutions for training ‘defective boy wards of the state’. The latter was less than 12 months old but have some ‘idea of the standard for which the Child Welfare Department is aiming for’. She visited the girl’s equivalent – ‘Brush Farm’ at Eastwood and ‘Montrose’ – a home for pre-school wards. She was most favourably impressed with ‘Lynwood Hall’ at Guildford ‘which caters for problem rather than defective or delinquent girls and is in the charge of two women graduate teachers’. Opened in 1939 the Lynwood Hall was managed by principal, Mary Lamond. She was succeeded by Edna McMaster, then Una Smith , Daphne Davies, Mrs Johnston, Jean King and Christine Conlon.  Ivy agreed with the principles on which it was developed:

I spent a most engrossing morning being shown the routine of the place, and the very real work that is being done in developing the self-respect and self-direction in a group of 60 saucy young lassies which think they have learned about ‘life’ from their American servicemen friends.

It was Ivy’s discussion with psychology students at the University of Sydney that raised in her real, ethical concerns about the state of training in psychology in the eastern states. She listened to their disappointment with  the course developed by Dr A H Martin assistant to Professor Tasman Lovell –  renowned for his pioneering work. Dr Martin’s course she described as a ‘nasty pill which must be swallowed before the students are keen enough can get out and train themselves in practical mental testing – a self-training which must be most painful and arduous’. Ivy, whose work in this area was scrupulous and thorough, worried about the potential for misuse.  ‘Most of them do astounding things with the Binet, have never heard of performance tests and make recommendations upon the basis of a doubtful Binet IQ which make my most incautious blunders appear pale pink beside them’.

I don’t want to appear over critical, but I’ve had the greatest difficulty keeping my opinions to myself in the face of the most obvious floundering and flagrant abuses of testing procedure among people supposedly trained graduates in psychology….Only the outstanding student who has it in him [can] get by on his own. A few others have awakened  to their weakness and are very woeful about it but most just flounder and are very unhappy when abuse comes – to their credit – or give up in despair. I think the demand for real clinical training among the students is so strong that the Sydney Psychology Department must be either blind or deliberately ignoring it.

Interesting….

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Deciding Who Will Be In Charge

18 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by in Conferences and Lectures

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In the Middle east at the moment dictatorships are being overthrown by the will of the people – some of whom are making and publishing films like this: The source of these videos, Qunfuz,is a blog following these events – tracking this conflict between government and governed. He highlights not just the loss of confidence in the government, that was gone long ago, but the ‘something’ that enables people to gather, join forces and work towards their own brand of collective freedom.

At the Australian Psychoanalytical Conference yesterday Dr Claudio Laks Eizirik a Brazilian and past president of the International Psychoanalytic Association talk about Power and its legitimisation.  He spoke of the power of repression, of unconscious drives; the power relationship between parent and child ( does he mean ‘authority’ here?) and of the relational nature between government and people. Eizirik cited Winnicott‘s ideas on democracy – a convenience whereby power is ceded to ‘government’ by the larger group so that individuals can get along with their lives.. It is a little different, I think, from the parent-child relationship; perhaps more expressive of a collective (unconscious) will.

But what if this relationship breaks down?  In answering this we may begin to see what it is that is ceded to the leader and why it is they come and go. In Britain Winston Churchill was the leader for the war, between 1939 and 1945. He related to and articulated something necessary for the British to be able to continue to fight and survive against enormous odds. Before and after this he seems unable to find the necessary pulse to be able to lead.

Claudio Laks Eizrik’s questioning was illustrated with his own experience of the Brazilian uprising followed by the takeover by the military in 1964. It had begun in 1961 when the president,Quadros, in office just seven months, resigned. He was to have been replaced by the Vice President, Goulart, then out of the country visiting China – a country a long way away and suspiciously Communist. Goulart was accused of being such by right-wingers. He was initially not able to take office, only doing so after protracted negotiations by his brother-in-law in 1963. He legitimized his position through a referendum.

Goulart’s attempts to socialize the country were countered by demonstrations -popular uprisings –  followed by the Army’s decision to take control. More detail  is here. Claudio Laks Eizrik remembered being in the crowd of protesters facing the Generals outside the presidential building when someone began to sing the national anthem. The crowd followed. After a pause the general joined them.  At that moment, ( this is my reading of it), the General joined the people. He gained enough legitimacy for the coup to succeed without bloodshed.

I don’t have any great insights to offer here. Other than to say that when the leader is out of touch with the people’s will but continues to rule, a kind of tyrannt can be set up where the leader holds the governed in thrall. As a ‘metaphor’ for the analytical situation, it is also a warning…

Psychoanalysis and Culture : universal psychic truths”.

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

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The title of the Open Day of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society to be held in Melbourne on Saturday 17 September at the Treacy Centre.  Here is the blurb for it. To quote:

Dr Claudio Laks Eizirik (Brazil), distinguished international speaker and past president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, together with Dr John McClean and Associate Professor Frances Thomson-Salo of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society (President and past President) will address the ways in which intrapsychic forces, which can be identified and analysed in the consulting room, may also be played out in the wider social group…

How might we understand, for instance, what in the human psyche enables individuals to rise up against hatred and oppression, to confront the abuse of power, as demonstrated in the “Arab Spring” uprising and the recent turmoil/eruptions in the UK?