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.

On Redemption – Christine Piper’s “After Darkness”.

05 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by in western australia

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Review: Christine Piper, After Darkness, Allen and Unwin, 2014.

“Redemption” – the act of setting free ; deliverance from sin and damnation; an act of restoration of a person or thing – OED Online.

NOTE: This review is subject to copyright restrictions and as such the author of this blog and blog post  needs to be properly acknowledged.

A long time ago, in another life, not long after the fall of the Whitlam government,  I THINK I worked with Christine Piper’s father. This was at the domestic end of the public service, running, amongst other things, the tea lady service in a large government department. It would have been in the early months of his marriage. I remember overhearing long phone calls from his desk on the other side of the room as my colleague tried to help his newish wife, recently arrived from Japan with their new baby, to cope with the vagaries of Australian culture. It is hardly surprising the daughter of such a marriage would be writing about transcultural experience. Intimacy, identity and the transition from from one culture to another are at the centre of Christine Piper’s award winning novel: After Darkness.

This is Christine Piper’s first novel, written as a requirement for her degree in creative arts, and winner of the Vogel Award for 2014. Essentially historical in nature, Piper uses the story of Dr Tomokuzo Ibaraki to explore themes of loss and transition, pride,  fall and ultimately, redemption. Her interest is also upon a traumatic period in Japanese history in the twentieth century – experiments in germ warfare but her focus is upon the mind of Ibaraki, a doctor participant in this program. Piper’s vision concerns what happens within the minds of those who participate in atrocity. Here, Ibaraki is ‘Everyman’: a Japanese where honor and obedience matter most. When he fails he flees.

First a bit of history. After Japan bombed Darwin in northern Australia in 1942, Prime Minister John Curtin said ‘This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race’.  In the earlier years of the war Japanese residents in Australia were interned if they were considered to be a threat; in the later years they were rounded up and imprisoned ‘en masse’. At its peak 12,000 people were interned in eight large camps: three in New South Wales, two in Western Australia and one each in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland. Records show there were at least five smaller ‘holding camps’ and a number of smaller camps around the country. Loveday the internment camp in South Australia at the centre of Christine Piper’s novel, After Darkness, housed up to five thousand people at a location near Barmera on the Murray River in the Riverland district of South Australia. The site was selected because of its nearby transportation (rail and road), its irrigated fields and because both electricity and telephone communications were available. Residents – tradespeople and professionals – Germans, Italians, Chinese from Formosa and Japanese were housed in four separate compounds linked by areas of land that were cleared and cultivated for sale.

At the beginning of the novel  Tomakazu Ibaraki, a Japanese National, is working as a doctor to the Japanese community in the pearl fishing town of Broome north-western Australia.He goes about his duties carefully and methodically, detached enough, it seems, maintain professionalism. It is not clear at first why he is there. Dedicated to his career he is an arrogant man who believes in his superiority and is careful to sustain form. Because he is of Japanese birth and nationality, Ibaraki is imprisoned by the Australian authorities after the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942 and sets about working out his days the camp hospital. He is assisted by Sister Bernice, an Australian born nun who has been sent to the camps by her Order. Her figure moves from the edges of Ibaraki’s mind to its centre. She is mother and potential love in one – a counterpoint to the world of hospital and military officials, Australian and Japanese.  Ibaraki, increasingly, and surprising to himself, distances himself from them.Ibaraki learns Sister Bernice has a life and family in Geraldton, Western Australia. As she comes and goes from the camp, in and out of Ibaraki’s life, he begins to apprehend his feelings for her.

The use of ‘flashbacks’, Piper’s weaving of the text back and forth between past and present, slowly takes the reader into the structures of Ibaraki’s mind. She shows how his real thoughts begin to break through the social forms he maintains. Memories, despite his efforts to keep them at bay, begin to emerge. There is the death of his brother, an airman shot down in the course of his war service, and the person to whom Ibaraki is closest. He has a wife, Kayoko, left behind in Japan. He is estranged from her – a result of Ibaraki’s dedication to his work and her belief that his preoccupation and distancing of her is the result of an affair. Kayoko cannot see beyond her world into the mind of another.

The truth is all the more worse because Ibarako has signed a secrecy agreement to work in a new laboratory developed by the Japanese government. Piper shifts the swathes of curtains making passage to the offices at the centre of Ibarako’s work where he has signed on as a doctor in the Japanese germ warfare program. Here people – men, women, children and babies, prisoners of war, convicts and disabled have been, amongst other practices deliberately infected with bubonic plague, or typhus, or cholera. Others have been exposed to extreme heat or cold and their bodily reactions, to the point of death, observed. It was, and remains, a deeply troubling for Japanese people as Piper also observed in her award winning essay, ‘Unearthing The Past’ in 2014. Piper writes of the horror without flinching, describing each at their moment of death. It is Ibaraki’s task to dissect their bodies for analysis. Affected by one of them in particular – a small boy – who reminds him of his brother, perhaps, Ibaraki is unable to obey the orders of his commanding officers. He is dismissed as a failure. Leaving Japan saves face.

For some at Loveday, the internment camp to which Ibaraki is sent, isolation from their country prompts assertion of Japanese superiority and culture. Others, the half Japanese and Australian born Japanese are less sure, more overtly caught between cultures if not loyal to their country of birth. Amongst Ibaraki’s Australian patients are those who have perpetrated atrocities and who, like him are traumatised by their actions. It is to wonder about what it means to be free of shibboleths that hold one to a certain path and what it takes to loosen them.

For Quaker philosopher Margaret Fell,’personal salvation depends upon the mind discerning the light within and then diligently keeping to it’.  Christine Piper’s concern, the freeing of a troubled mind imprisoned within the constraints and restraints, conscious and unconscious, of his internal world, is ultimately political and ethical. While internment in a country culturally far different to his own also fails to mirror unconsciously held constraints and restraints upon thought and behaviour that enable continuity of being, it is the internal collapse of these that  enables Ibaraki to reconcile his various forms and roles – son, husband, doctor, sportsman, brother, loyal employee – into a new and different position. Sister Bernice’s presence during this process her coming and going, represents this new moral and humane, if not theological position. It is one form of heroism, opening the way for further exploration.

This is not to suggest that Australians, or members of any other culture do things better than anyone else.  Piper is arguing for a different, ethical position, where living occurs in the space between the rights and wrongs, whys and wherefores of one action or another. In this respect her study of the intimate workings of the mind of a single person resonates with the theological and political morality implicit in the work of American author, Marilynne Robinson. It will be interesting to see what evolves from this work.

Reviewed for the Australian Women’s Writers Challenge 2015.

Religion, Fanaticism and Trauma – The Freud Conference, Melbourne, 2015

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Conferences and Lectures, Freud Conference

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. Historically there has always been movements that have drawn youth to its ranks – whether the Children’s Crusades of the 12th century or more recently the Spanish War and Hitler youth. ISIS is another attracting teenagers to its ranks. Why this is happening at this time will be a question for future historians.

This year Melbourne’s Annual Freud Conference, to be held on Saturday 16 May at Melbourne’s ‘Brain Centre’ in Royal Parade, Parkville,  welcomes two speakers who have made a particular study of fundamentalism and violence in the individual: Dr Dr Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber and Dr Werner Bohleber, both from the German Psychoanalytical Society.

Dr Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber will deliver two papers: ‘ Processes of Political Radicalization’ and ‘Psychoanalytic Projects on Prevention: Working with Migrant Families.

Dr Werner Bohleber’s paper is entitled: ‘Radicalized Religious Fundamentalism: Identification With an Idealized Object and Destructiveness’.

The full agenda is here.

The registration form is here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Review: Peter Singer, Pushing Time Away.

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Peter Singer, Pushing Time Away, Australia, Harper Collins, 2003.

 

In March 1939 psychiatrist Dr Anita Muhl, newly arrived in Melbourne from the United States, was contracted for three years to educate and lecture medical and other professionals about developmental psychology and psychiatry. She was in the process of setting up her office in St Kilda Road when Dr Kora Singer, a recent arrival from Vienna, wrote to her:

Mr Penhalluriack, the Passport and Control Officer was kind enough to mention your name and to tell me you might be looking for a part-time assistant. Therefore I beg to offer my services. I am a Viennese lady-doctor and passed my medical degree in Vienna in 1932. After that, I was working for four years as a resident medical officer in the General Hospital in Vienna where I spent almost a year on the Clinic for Psychiatry.

Clearly Kora Singer, an Austrian doctor, had found respect and support from government officials who went out their way to help her. Not so the British Medical Association in Australia. In 1939, imagining that an influx of refugee doctors would undermine the quality of medical practice in Australia, the BMA was lobbying the government to prevent overseas trained doctors from practising unless they undertook further training. Muhl could not practice either. Her three year contract was underwritten by philanthropist and doctor Una Cato. To make ends meet Singer had accepted a part time job as a laboratory assistant at the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women.

The main source for Kora’s story is Peter Singer’s lucidly written: ‘Pushing Time Away‘, Kora Singer needed the work. She and her husband Ernst, a businessman, were  trying to raise enough money to support the emigration of Kora’s parents David and Amalie Oppenheim and Ernst Singer’s parents from Jewish Vienna. They had the visas but not, it seems the will although Kora and Ernst had departed for Australia in August 1938, six months after the Anchluss, when Hitler and his army had taken Vienna. David Oppenheim, Kora’s father, a teacher, scholar and humanist thinker, had lost the teaching post at the school he had taught for thirty years. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the Nazis had destroyed Jewish homes, businesses and places and worship, matters had become far more pressing. But David, who had fought in the First World War, and who had been awarded medals for distinguished service, thought he was untouchable. So many of his army comrades had thought likewise. Besides he was reluctant to leave his beloved library. The Oppenheims also did not wish to put financial pressure on their Australian family by emigrating – even though by March 1939, Kora had found another job.

Peter Singer’s account of the lives of his grandparents, David and Amalie Oppenheim is also about his own journey as he discovers something of his origins and a like mind in his grandfather.  Busy with his work as a philosopher and ethicist, Peter Singer did not turn his mind to his grandparents’ story until he was close to sixty. When he began to read David’s letters and follow his career, he discovered a shared  interest in understanding the problems of humanity. David, a classical scholar, an expert in Greek mythology, in sexuality and cultural life, was interested in the symbolism within them for understanding contemporary human life and problems. His discovery of psychoanalysis in the early 1900s complemented and expanded his knowledge: he was, for a short time, a member of Freud’s Wednesday Group. Author of some sixteen published articles he co wrote an article with Freud – Dreams in Folklore. Oppenheim eventually departed from Freud, choosing follow Adler, another member of the circle, who split with Freud – not particularly because he objected to Freud’s theory but more in response to Freud’s poor treatment of Adler and others whose views differed from his. He became an editor the Adlerian Journal of Individual Psychology.

During his research visits and discussions amongst the family Singer was astounded to discover a cache of letters between his grandparents, David and Amalie. In this section Singer lucidly explicates the quality and nature of his grandparents’ thinking and perception of their world. Informed by science and the humanities, their interest was not upon the quantifiable nature of the psychologies but the inner mystery and uncertainties of being human.In the woman who became his wife David discovered a kindred spirit. In these youthful years both were exploring their sexuality, and love for members of the same sex as well as heterosexual relationships. Were they both homosexual? Singer lets the matter rest, exploring in detail their feelings and thinking about the nature of love. For both love between women and between men was one of the finest forms and part of appreciating beauty. Amalie was the only one in whom David could confide his innermost thoughts and feelings on matters of  love – platonic, spiritual, sexual and emotional. Amalie was no intellectual slouch either. Also a university graduate in science she let go a brilliant career to marry David. He in turn  chose against the uncertainties of an academic career for the security of a teaching position in a boys school in Vienna. It brought in enough money for the couple to start a family. He remained in his teaching post at the same school for thirty years until Hitler came to power and expelled Jewish people from the professions. Throughout Singer lucidly explicates the quality and nature of his grandparents’ thinking and perception of their world. Informed by science and the humanities, their interest was not upon the quantifiable nature of the psychologies but the inner mystery and uncertainties of being human.

Peter Singer’s handling the story of David’s and Amalie’s lives in Vienna after Hitler came to power is breathtakingly sad. For a reader who ‘knows’ what befell Jewish people in Germany, David’s reluctance to leave the country and his beloved library seems to be and ignorant blindness. But then no one knows what is going to happen next in their lives; it is only with hindsight that we learn. Peter Singer writes of this and David’s illness with diabetes, of periods in hospital and his slow, slow convalescence which delayed and continued to delay the couple’s departure. They had long been granted Visas for Australia and, before David’s illness occurred, had intended to travel with their son-in-laws parents. But this too was  delayed on the Singer side when a member of the family was arrested by the Gestapo for possessing a contraband camera.

The matter of fact way Singer writes of this period, I think, underlines the gravity and horror of their situation. In 1943 the couple were transported to Thereseinstadt. David died shortly afterwards. Amalie survived: through what means Singer does not know. She eventually made it to her daughters in Melbourne, Australia where she remained until her death in 1955.By then Kora Singer had gained her registration and was practising.

Somehow in the mean-time, before the war finally ended, news got through to Australia that David had died in the camp. His death notice appeared in the Argus on  1 September 1944. Ignored by most of the population who knew little, if anything, of the death camps, this little notice is a reminder of the humanity and culture lost to Hitler’s megalomania. It is a reminder too of the damage to humanity of totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany – and of ignorance.

 

References and further reading

Kora Singer to Anita Muhl, 19 March 1939, Papers of Anita Muhl, Box 1766/9, State Library of Victoria.

Freud, Sigmund and Oppenheim, David, ‘Dreams in Folklore’, Dreams in Folklore – published in  The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), Vol. 12, pp. 177–203.

SINGER Ernst born 26 March 1905; Kora age 31; nationality German; travelled per ORONSAY arriving in Melbourne on 27 September 1938 http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=7226079 retrieved 11 March 2015

 

Applicant – SINGER Ernst and SINGER Kora; Nominee – OPPENHEIM Doris; nationality Austrian, http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=8209882 retrieved 11 March 2015

‘The Question of Singer’ The Age, February 1 2003, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/29/1043804403591.html retrieved 11 march 2015

‘David Oppenheim’s Case’, Peter Singer, reply by David Mendelsohn, New York Review of Books,  January 15, 2004, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2004/jan/15/david-oppenheims-case/ retrieved 11 March 2015.

 

 

The Shame of This – on the right to mental health

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in Human Rights

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The 2014 Human Rights Commission Report,   “The Forgotten Children” signed off by lawyer Gillian Triggs, is an the result of an inquiry into refugee children kept in detention on Nauru, an island to Australia’s north. The findings are damning for the Australian government, left and right. Trigg’s report is currently the centre of a row which, as I write, is threatening to bring the government down. Interestingly there are a number of politicians, vocal in their criticism of the report and calling for Triggs’s resignation, who have not read the report which has been discredited by the current prime minister as too left leaning.

It is clear from the report that Triggs has consulted with many mental health professionals, including specialists in infant mental health, preschoolers, and children at all stages of life right through to early adulthood. She has drawn upon literature and research which is clear in the argument that early life experiences have an impact on later life.

Above all the question is why it should be so?

On page 19 it is stated:

Australia is the only country in the world with a policy that imposes mandatory and indefinite immigration detention on asylum seekers as a first action. While other countries detain children for matters related  to immigration, including Greece, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, South Africa and the U.S.; detention in these countries is not mandatory and does not occur as a matter of course.
Both the Labor and Liberal Ministers for immigration stated that detention of children had no deterrent effect for asylum seekers who elected to make the risky journey to Australia.
This is a report where the message is unwanted and certainly unsavoury. No one emerges as a hero here, except Triggs herself who has spoken the unspeakable.
You can read the entire report: “The Forgotten Children”, here.

Christopher Bollas: ‘China on The Mind’ – Book Review

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Book Reviews, Psychoanalysis in Oriental Culture

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I wrote this review which was first published in Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 31. no 1 ( 2013).

Christopher Bollas, China On The Mind, Routledge, London and New York, 2013.
In a sense Christopher Bollas’s ‘China on the Mind’ is a timely piece. China is now taking its place as a significant world power commanding recognition in a way Westerners can no longer ignore. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western colonisers, bent on transmitting their version of civilisation, were met by resistance and withdrawal. The West retired, snubbing China, rendering it mysterious and ineffable, isolated and unreachable far too different to think much about. During Mao Tse Tung’s leadership from 1949 until the early 1970s, the West, in the form of the United States and Australia pretended mainland China did not exist. Taiwan, an island, was recognised instead. Britain recognised mainland China in 1950. In its turn, China, the Middle Kingdom, neither heeded nor needed the West nor anyone else for that matter, even as Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward of the 1960s sent its younger generations to root out old traditions and foundation texts in an effort to join the modern world (Han Suyin, 1967, pp.48-49). But the elders prevailed. Secretly. They maintained Chinese culture, keeping the teachings of the old philosophers and poets hidden beneath the covers of Mao’s Little Red Book. Since Mao’s death ventures into western thought, begun during the early twentieth century, have resumed. In China, psychoanalysis, first introduced in the 1920s, is now being rediscovered by younger generations.

In an interview for the online journal Line of Beauty in 2011,Christopher Bollas described China On The Mind, that he was then writing, as a ‘very strange book’, predicting it would probably not be a big success (Bollas, 2011). It began as a series of lectures for Korean students and was rejected by the course conveners as potentially offensive. But, encouraged by his publisher, he has now released it as an essay. Beginning as an exploration of the differences between Eastern and Western thought it has morphed into a theory of mind that has significant implications for the future study of mental processes. Bollas writes:
In the brief 100 years since psychoanalysis has become the core introspective philosophy of the West, how do we understand its intriguing unconscious integration of eastern and western frames of mind? The maternal order that is foundational to psychoanalysis has been subjected to an ongoing repression within the psychoanalytical movement, but since this represents an eastern way of being and relating, is it possible that growing commerce between east and west will re-repress the maternal order and challenge …paternal focus that has so bound psychoanalytical discourse? (2013 pp 13-14).

There are indications that the individualism of western psychoanalysis and psychology is under critical scrutiny in China. In a case study published during 2011 Psychoanalyst Zhong Jie argues that a patient’s sense of duty to his work unit is not defensive but an expression of his sense of place within the collective. He explains: the concept of oneness (He-Yi) is probably the most important Chinese philosophical idea for understanding the relationship between humans and nature. He continues, this supports the Chinese belief in keeping harmony (He-Xie) and peace (He-Ping), and is the most important principle in Chinese society and family, and also in the Chinese mind and heart. Necessarily, then, needs for freedom, autonomy or earning respect are secondary principles that are controlled by the overriding principle of oneness (Zhong 2011, pp. 218-226).

China, the centre of Eastern thought,is  the location of its foundation texts, even as Japan and Korea have developed their separate forms. Bollas sets out not just to understand the complementarities between the eastern and western minds, but also to demonstrate the unity between them. He is not the first in the psychological field to attempt this. Singapore based psychologist Michael Harris Bond, who has sought to integrate eastern and western subjectivities, has provided a seminal text on the psychology of Chinese people used to brief Western diplomats (Bond, 1990). The idea of the East as against West is also a western construct: a division between self and other. Bollas proceeds cautiously, recognising that the categories ‘East’, ‘West’, ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ are somewhat simplistic, arbitrary and reductionist in their nature nor is the distinction between them absolute. They are also in certain and specific ways inaccurate(p.2). Bollas acknowledges he will have to settle on half truths to develop [his] argument(p.2). One risk is that he will be viewed as utilising ‘Eastern’ culture to develop his particular view of psychoanalysis with the result that the more salient issue, concerning the meaning for the development of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind of the encounter between cultures with very different foundation matrices, will be lost. His writing is densely layered, building upon his earlier work some thirty volumes – exploring the articulation of the authentic self in psychoanalysis. He is setting the stage for a new creation, a third thinking space, neither one nor the other, but an embodiment of both. His concern is with the interrelation between the individual self and the ethical, social, and divine order of things arguing that this anticipates his broader argument concerning the conflict between the individual and the large group (p.5). Bollas is adding to a body of work on transculturality in group analysis which has enabled commonalities to emerge from profound diversities in cultural matrix including language – within the large group setting (Brown 1996).
Although it appears that difference between Eastern and Western thought is so wide as to be insurmountable, Bollas argues that Eastern and Western thought represent different parts of the mind(p.2). While East and West both regard life as a journey, the two have diverged since antiquity, emphasising different aspects human being (p.7). Western culture is representational, Bollas says. Content is the core of the communication. The eastern mind is presentational, concentrating on the form of being (p.6). Historically the western mind is of the paternal order. categories of communication…are language dependent. These convey the views of the father and, later, the assumptions and laws of society(p.3). Focus is upon exploration of the material world. Logic, rationalism and the focus on the individual have been guiding principles since Plato’s time in Ancient Greece. Myths and legends honour its adventurers, their quests and triumphs, representing and assuming the superiority of western culture. The East, beginning with Turkey and thence towards China, Japan and Korea, followed a different route, concentrating on the maternal aspect of being. Bollas explains: the maternal order refers to the forms of knowledge conveyed to the self as foetus, neonate and infant, prior to the acquisition of language. This is presentational knowledge. The world, as thing, presents itself or is presented and thus leaves impressions on the self(p.2). The mother ‘instructs’ the infant through her actions, Bollas continues. The infant learns from its environment: through sensation- touch, taste sight and sound, transforming these into experience ( p.3). The maternal order emphasises the obligation to live in harmony with nature within the social, natural and cosmic world (p.8). Now, despite following these differing trajectories, East and West are starting to turn to each other Bollas says. In so doing [they] can be seen to complement each other, even if such contiguity may be conflicted(p. 8). Bollas contends that the work of Khan and Winnicott in Britain has enabled the development of a form of psychoanalysis resonant with eastern thought, even though they apparently failed to recognise this antecedent(p.10).

We journey with Bollas as he explores each of the foundation texts: The Book of Changes (I Ching), The Book of Songs, The Book of Rites: and their interpreters Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tsu and Zhuangzi.. We listen to the ancient poets as he draws connections between these and the form embodied in psychoanalysis. Bollas considers each of the texts, beginning with the Book of Changes. Here, each moment is one for contemplation. The player of the I Ching recognises that each of us is chance personified Bollas writes. He continues [This is] not simply a metaphor for the diverse idioms of a human life; playing this game is to unfold in fields of variant human experience… to discover how destiny is entwined with fatep.25). Each throwing Bollas concludes, is an action thought that enables us to think our existencep. 25). The Book of Songs elaborates the idea of selfhood expressed through poetry. Bollas explains: the poem especially is a part of mental life. To hear a poem is to think unthought known experiences; as essential to a Chinese person as language itself(p. 29). Poetry expresses the form of experience. The self lives in a poem, as an individual but also part of shared human experience down generations. A person’s being is transformed…through poetry, into its representatives in the natural world; individual idiom is transferred into selected poetic objects (p.34). We might see this in the writings of Han Suyin, whose allusions to the work of poet Li Po thread through her interpretation of Chinese culture to western readers (Han Suyin, 1942, 1967). Similarly Mao T’se Tung’s composition and reading of poetry, if not his use of Confucian form, serve to elaborate his response to various events in his life. Individual idiom can be detected in the poetry through the ages Bollas writes. It is not in the objects but in the form the poet arranges them (p.34). In this way, he continues,generations have worked to create a mentality that will both house the individual and weave him into the world within which he lives and from which he must depart.(p.34).

If The Book of Songs finds resonance in Winnicott’s conceptualisations of the true self, then The Book of Rites concerns the false, protective self. Confucius, the main interpreter of The Book of Rights, posited an order of being in relation to others so as to tame and manage nature a process elaborated upon by Lao Tsu. Both argued for the ideal self, able to live in harmony with nature. These writings order thought and one’s place in the social and familial structure, teaching what it is to be moral and ethical person. And lest it be assumed there is no Oedipal configuration…there are unusual restrictions placed on the eldest son in the filial relation to the father and to elders,Bollas writes. The Book of Rites teaches the distinction between men and beasts….[it] boils down to a set of regulations which aim to prevent the sort of mess Oedipus got himself into with Jocasta (p.44). To read the Tao Te Ching ‘The Way’- is to be reminded of Bion’s remarks on the ineffability of ‘O and one’s struggle with ‘K’ and ‘-K’.Implicit is the idea of the maternal function or reverie, and in analysis, Bion’s notion of evenly suspended attention irritable reaching for fact and reason. A baby and mother act and react upon each other ostensibly building a history together. We are formed and reformed in relationship with others. The Tao takes this further: we are each our own but inevitably a part of the whole even before birth.
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In Western psychoanalysis the unconscious is the self’s creativity Bollas writes (p.60). It combines paternal and maternal the boundedness of the analytic hour the paternal – holding the [maternal] space (p.61). In the work of Winnicott and Khan, Bollas says, we can see the intersection between presentational and representational order. The analyst stands aside, enabling and holding the space for free association thoughtless speech .Through this it is possible to surmise the patterns of these relationships between self and other, to hear a stunningly articulate private discourse(p.110). The analyst’s quietness, by not interfering with the analysand’s gesture or speech, allows the patient to hear from themselves, from their parents, from their ancestors, and from their culture(pp. 110-12).

One always exists in relation to the environment. One is a singular entity and yet irrevocably part of something larger, simultaneously influencing and being effected by its process. A mother and her infant act upon each other, forming and shaping one another. Each movement or gesture between them originates in past family and social relationships. As a member of a couple, family or group we each embody a heritage that is familial and social, past and present. It is a view resonant with Chinese Eastern thought: the individual holds a place in harmony with the broader matrix. Individualism, so prized by westerners, emerges in relationship with the whole.

Already Bollas’s book has its detractors. In a review published online in April 2013, Thomas Friedman argues that Bollas’s ‘idealism’ of Eastern thought also undermines the psychoanalytic project, by introducing a religious point of view through a back door approach of linking Chinese philosophy with the psychoanalytic praxis(his term) of Donald Winnicott and Masud Khan Friedman continues, a further connection is made to the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein, Bion and Rosenfeld as he morphs his book from the Chinese philosophers to his own preferred view of psychoanalysis Not only that but Bollas encourages the abandonment of free association, and the importance of verbal memory(Friedman, 2013).

While respondents to this piece criticised Friedman for his errors concerning Bollas’s views on free association, Bollas’s and Friedman’s essential conflict over the nature and purpose of psychoanalysis, which has its roots in the history of psychoanalytic thought, remains. From 1920 through to 1940s psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, criticised the notion that psychology applied only to the individual. He eventually rejected Freud’s libidinal theory as he sought to reconcile Marxist and Freudian thought. Following Bachoven’s idea of the maternal principle he developed a theory of the mature individual existing within a social and historical matrix (Jay, 1971, pp.91-100). In his forward to Peter Rudnytsky’s edited collection of essays, Rescuing Psychoanalysis From Freud (2011) Brett Kahr asks us to consider that Freud may not have understood his creation. By ousting or marginalising his detractors, amongst them Jung, Stekel, Adler and Ferenczi, Freud threatened to limit psychoanalysis by his conservatism and orthodoxy. Rudnytsky’s recovery of these and other analysts, and his development of a ‘thought-line’ from Ferenczi through to Winnicott and Coltart also rescues psychoanalysis’s creative and maternalist – potential (Kahr in Rudnytsky, 2011, p.xvi). Similarly, Bollas says Freud misunderstood his discovery. ?reud found psychoanalysis. It might have been a gift from the East of which he was unawarep.134).

Friedman, who fears for the scientific recognition for which psychoanalysis has strived since Freud, shares much with Zhong Jie (2011) who wonders about the potential loss of Chinese culture as a result of globalisation. It has only just survived Mao’s attack. Bollas is also concerned about the future of psychoanalysis but in a different way; unless psychoanalysis can re-integrate maternal and paternal principles it risks being lost. He suggests that group relations work might help to engender a transgenerational social mind [with] the task of collecting a vision of a de-centred mind, a mind that could never be individually or even nationally defined, but that can be positioned as a potential space for group thinking (p. 117). This is not about recognition of East as exotic, nor merely giving it a voice: both these positions privilege western thought and detract from Bollas’s central thesis the integration of the maternal and paternal in mental functioning. It is rather more than an interesting idea or product of Bollas’s antipathy to psychoanalysis as Freidman and his ilk imply. As Chinese psychoanalyst Yang Yunping writes: psychoanalysis belongs to no-one. It overflows from the framework that attempts to constrain it despite those professional societies that appear to wish to represent it absolutely(Yang 2011, pp.733-743).

References

Bollas, C. (2011) Unconscious Thinking Out of Bounds: Christopher Bollas as Thinker and Artist :Interview with Anneleen Masschelein . Retrieved from http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/s/article/view/67/136)

Bond, M. H.and Hwang K. (1990). The social psychology of the Chinese people. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The psychology of the Chinese people. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown D. (1995). Group analysis, transculturality and ethics. British Journal of Psychotherapy. 12(2), 170-177.

Friedmann, H. J. (2013). China on the mind by Christopher Bollas, review, International Psychoanalysis. Retrieved from http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/2013/04/03/china-on-the-mind-by-christopher-bollas/ .

Han S. (1960). Destination Chungking. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Han S. (1967). China in the year 2001. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books.

Hofstede, G. & Bond, M. H. (2009). The Confucius connection. Retrieved from http://www2.seminolestate.edu/falbritton/Summer%202009/FHI/Articles/Hofstede.confucious%20connection%20120505%20science%20direct.pdf

Jay, M. (1971). The dialectical imagination. London: Heinemann Educational Books.

Nandy, A.(1995). The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Rudnytsky, P. L. (2011). Rescuing psychoanalysis from Freud and other essays in revision. London: Karnac.

Said. E. (2003). Freud and the non European, London and New York: Verso.

Yang Yunping. ( 2011). The challenge of professional identity for Chinese clinicians in the process of learning and practising psychoanalytic psychotherapy: the discussion on the frame of Chinese culture. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 92 (3),733-743.

Zhong Zie. (2011). Working with Chinese patients: Are there conflicts with Chinese culture and psychoanalysis? International Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis. 8 (3), 218-226.

Today (16 November) on BBC 3: Freud in Asia

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in western australia

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Something to follow up.

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BBC 3 Sunday Feature

Christopher Harding, John Gallagher

Sunday Feature,New Generation Thinkers

Documentaries presented by two of Radio 3’s New Generation Thinkers.

FREUD IN ASIA

Christopher Harding explores the influence of Freud on psychotherapy in Japan and India. Freud’s travels around Europe and the USA a century ago catapulted psychotherapy to fame.

The invitations to Japan and India came too late for him to travel but he found his work debated throughout Asia. In India he was discussed by British colonial officers, who penned amateur tracts about Indian nationalism as mere sexual trauma.

Thousands of miles further east in Tokyo, Freud was partnered with a medieval Buddhist saint in the hybrid psychoanalytic technique of Heisaku Kosawa. Mishima read and was influenced by his work. Christopher Harding explores the spread of Freud’s influence and its significance.

A JOURNEY INTO THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE PHRASE BOOK

John Gallagher focuses on the…

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Mental Hospitals for Returned Soldiers -WW1

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in John Springthorpe, Shell Shock, War Neurosis

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Further to my previous post about psychiatric treatment of shell-shocked soldiers in  Australia after the end of the Great War I notice that an exhibition about this has been opened in Melbourne.The AGE announced it today under the heading: “Family Tells of WW1 War Hero’s 35 Years as a Mental Patient in Bundoora Hospital”. A life wasted….You can read about it here….

On the 100th Anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli – 25 April 2015

25 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by in John Springthorpe, War Neurosis

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 Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War, Kensington, NSW, UNSW Press, 2009.

In what way, I wonder, will the psychoanalytic fraternity in Australia acknowledge the  the Great War a century ago, the emergence of psychoanalytic treatment amongst the medical profession? For Australians next year marks the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli on 25th January 1915. Although psychoanalysis in Australia had its origins in these wartime hospitals and in the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers as historian, Joy Damousi also points out, I am slightly surprised to find this has been somewhat overlooked by the professional community – and others. I could be wrong here and am certainly open to correction.In 1919 three psychiatrists – or were they called ‘neurologists’ in those days?- returned to Australia from the Military Hospitals  where they had worked alongside British colleagues, including, perhaps, W.H.R. Rivers whose work with shell-shock victims is recorded in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy published from 1991.  They had discovered Freud’s ideas of the ‘talking cure’ in the treatment of shell shock- Paul Dane, John Springthorpe and Roy Coupland Winn among them. On the other side of the fence at the fifth Psychoanalytic Congress at Budapest in 1918  Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi had presented his findings on War Neurosis. Ferenczi was subsequently elected President of the International Psychoanalytical Association – before the war turned and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was defeated.

During the 1920s Both Dane and Winn returned to England for further psychoanalytic training. Melbourne based Dane was analysed by Joan Riviere and, in 1939, sent his daughter to England for treatment with Anna Freud. Winn who lived in Sydney was was a patient of Dr Noble. In 1931 he set up the first private practice as a psychoanalyst in Australia. On the eve of the Second World War both liaised with the Australian Government and with Ernest Jones for the resettlement of European psychoanalysts displaced by war in Australia.

In the immediate post war period, when it was becoming clearer that soldiers were returning suffering from shell shock as well as other severe medical conditions, a third doctor, Melbourne based John Springthorpe, set about trying to ameliorate the situation – or at the very least establish a method of treatment for them. Before the war Springthorpe was one of the most senior medical practitioners in the neurological field with considerable experience in treatment of the insane. In February 1919 Springthorpe was appointed as the Commonwealth Medical Referee for Neurological cases. By mid 1920 his services were terminated.

On 14 July 1920 he wrote to the Commonwealth Repatriation Commission to express his views about the way ‘neurological cases’ in the cohort of returned soldiers were being managed. His letter, discovered in the National Archives of Australia is sharply critical of the attitude of local medical practitioners who had no experience of war conditions. People who suffered from war trauma were far more numerous and complex than his other concern, the cardiac cases but, as Springthorpe wrote, ‘ the local Medical Boards ( without any experience at the front) had discharged many as malingerers and without any pension. They have been coming back ever since. Later on they were quite wrongly treated with isolation and restraint’. At ‘Mcleod’, a Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne to which he was placed in charge  in February 1919, Springthorpe  discovered that ‘cases were then all over the hospital and elsewhere, without any differential diagnosis and with but very little treatment’. He continued:

‘I separated, classified, and treated them…By August I had treated 111 shell-shock and hysteroid and 132 neurasthenic,  with 51 complicated by gas poisoning, a number also cardiac and 26 confusional or mental. The treatment occupational, Home or other Leave, physical and psychotherapy drugs etc is summarized in a report to the DGMS ( Director General Medical Services) in November’ 1919.

Springthorpe was relieved of his duties in August 1919, even though, he noted,  he was ‘well on the way to the establishment of a satisfactory scheme’ but there was no provision for follow up after discharge from hospital’. Why this was so is not clear from the records I have looked at so far… perhaps he was a thorn in the side of the Commissioners. Springthorpe wrote:

Feeling that not all was being done for neurological cases (many were under no treatment and wandering about dissatisfied) I brought the matter under the notice of the Repatriation Department and also before the DGMS who, at my suggestion gave me an outpatient clinic one afternoon a week at the Base Hospital. I found, however, that another clinic was in prior operation, practising simply by hypnotism ( the use of which is now limited by experts to cases of amnesia and terrifying dreams and so out of place at this stage for outpatient treatment) and that there was no publicity whereby cases requiring treatment could learn of our existence and no official attempt to extend our influence’.

Despite his efforts the Repatriation Commission had decided not to ‘utilise my services’ despite support for him from the Minister and from the Returned Soldiers League. Be that as it may Springthorpe continued, ‘the obligation to action remains and all concerned to look to it to restore these most distressing of cases’.

In its response to Springthorpe’s letter the Repatriation Commission was having none of it. It rejected Springthorpe’s views on treatment and defended its authority and the knowledge if the doctors it had appointed – all senior, experienced, and recognised leaders in their fields.

‘All neurological cases were treated by physicians who are experienced and well qualified to do so’, an officer, Dr J F Agnew, opined in Minute Paper to the Commission’s Chairman.   None had been treated with restraint and isolation other than ‘definite mentals who have been certified insane by Lt Col Jones Inspector General of Mental Hospitals* and Major Hollow, Mental Specialist and Superintendent at Mont Park Asylum’, he continued.  Indeed the whole matter had been discussed by senior officials at the Medical Advisory Board. Agnew named these distinguished personages:  Sir Henry Maudsley, Lt Col. R R Stawell, Col Geoff. Syme and Lt Col. James Ramsay Webb – ‘all of whom are specialists with war service and experience’.

The Commission’s position is summed up in para 12 of the Minute:

Expert opinion is definite as to the best method to be adopted in the treatment of neurological cases as to the best method to be adopted in the treatment of neurological cases, and it is clearly laid down that the concentration of these men in a clinic is productive of more evil than good and in the best interests of the men they should be placed in suitable employment as the best and readiest means of their final rehabilitation… When these men are kept for unlimited periods in Hospital  in such clinics as Dr Springthorpe suggests they suffer from “Hospitalitis” and very often in the course of such treatment develop new symptoms owning to their proclivities to imitate the symptoms of their fellow patients.

It appears that  Springthorpe, drawing on his experience in the field hospitals,  recognized the degree of suffering caused by shell shock as something little known until the Great War and which affected all classes. The Commissioners on the other hand appear to have maintained a belief in a class distinction between themselves and, apparently, the  ‘lower classes’ that were the patients.

In August and September this year the Australian Broadcasting Corporation finished televising a 4 part series, ‘The War That Made Us’, tracing through the diaries of those who were there – a nurse, Kit McNaughton, an Officer, ‘Pompey Elliott’ and a trooper, Archie Barwick, their impressions and the psychological changes occurring within them as a result of their experiences at the Front. Elliott, we were told, did not recover from the war: he suicided in 1931. Kit McNaughton had her own suffering, too. Although she returned to her home at Little River south of Melbourne and married her long time beau, she remained torn between the life she had left behind on the fields of war and the conventions to which she returned. I have reviewed Janet Butler’s elegant biography of Mc Naughton ‘Kitty’s War’ here.

One of the historians featured on the program, albeit briefly, was Marina Larsson whose book, Shattered Anzacs: Living With the Scars of War published in 2009, takes up the problem of post war suffering.

Front Cover

Death did not occur only on the battlefields, she points out, but often many years later as a result of wounds and illness. Death also occurred through suicide as a result of mental distress and trauma – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Larsson also points to the cost to families when a loved one returns home and slowly reveals their depth of scarring. The insidious onset of alcoholism, heavy smoking and domestic violence are all responses to unbearable pain and terror. The casualties of war are far reaching across time. They may be held for generations within the family’s unconscious.

What became of Springthorpe and of the men who returned from war with such shocking psychological injuries is something to look at further. Marina Larsson has made a very good start.

References:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation ( 2014) ‘The War That Changed Us’ Television Series, televised August-September 2014.

Pat Barker,(1991) Regeneration, Sydney, Penguin Books.

Janet Butler (2013), Kitty’s War:The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press.

Joy Damousi (2005), Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, Kensington, UNSW Press.

Marina Larsson ( 2009), Shattered Anzacs: Living With The Scars of War, Kensington, NSW, UNSW Press.

Dr John Springthorpe’s Memo on treatment of Cardiac and War Neurosis, 14 July 1920. Series No A2489, Control Symbol 1920/ 4166, Barcode, 4794937, Canberra, National Archives of Australia.http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/Imagine.asp?B=4794937, accessed 25 September 2014

Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Repatriation, Minute Paper, re Dr Springthorpe’s memo. on Treatment of Cardiac and war Neurosis, dated 23 July 1920, Series No A2489, Control Symbol 1920/ 4166, Barcode, 4794937, Canberra, National Archives of Australia.http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/Imagine.asp?B=4794937, accessed 25 September 2014.

* W. Ernest Jones, Inspector General of the Insane was given an honorary post in the Army.