Tag Archives: Anna Freud

A Letter Home – Ruth Thomas

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in 1940s, Anna Freud Centre, Australian Women in Psychoanalysis, Child Study, Government policy, History of Child Guidance, Lay analysis, Ruth Thomas

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Ruth Thomas was born in Sydney in 1902. She a graduate of Sydney’s Fort Street School and continued onwards to Sydney University to study psychology and, in 1923, the founding year of the Australian Society of Psychology and Philosophy, runner up in an essay competition adjudicated by Professor Francis Anderson. The winning essay, ‘The Relation of Repression to Mental Development’ by a Mr Cunningham from the University of Melbourne was published in the Association’s journal. Sadly, Ruth Thomas’s essay, nor the title were published.  On 3 February 1924 the Social and Gossip Column in Perth’s Sunday Mail announced her impending arrival as a lecturer at Claremont Teacher’s College – also under the directorship of Robert Cameron.By 1933 Perth had claimed her as its own. She was moving further afield, the newspapers announced,  she moved to London to take up the post of Principle Lecturer in Education at St Gabriel’s College in Camberwell. ‘Rarely are Australian’s so well treated’ wrote the editor of the Daily News in October 1933. Ruth Thomas had written to her friends who passed her letter to the paper. It was published in full. it is a digression, but reveals some of the liveliness of this woman who seems to be soaking the old world and its beauty into her being..

‘I have just spent a week-end at Cambridge, which is lovely. We went over Trinity and King’s on a wet Sunday afternoon. One or two punts were out on the river in spite of the weather, and the light falling through the woods along the parklands where most of the colleges ‘back’ in (so, Cambridge ‘Backs’ they are called) was almost green as it fell through the bright colors of the new trees. I’ve seen nothing like it before. You’d laugh at it on canvas as unreal. It was fun to see the solemn young undergraduates in grey flannels and brown Norfolk jackets pacing about with the inevitable pipe. I guess they’re luckier than they know.

All was of consuming interest, even where she lived..

‘I have ‘digs’ of my own over-looking a lovely square just off the river and ten minutes from everywhere. I climb solemnly up four flights of very dirty stairs, with the odor of last century’s cooked eggs, and purple wallpaper. At the top I’ve managed to set up some thing like a decent ‘diggings.’ My room is 16ft. by 13 ft., newly done out in cream, and with a built-in wardrobe. Hence it was easy to make it look like it a study. I have a nice Davis carpet, very oriental, in orange and fawn, and ‘ a low divan you’d never recognise as a bed, bookcase and a desk, and other I whatnots, scoured from the Jewish shops in Fulham Road. The scouring required when I got them was another matter.

Perhaps London life at last sated Ruth’s hunger for the arts and culture, and a bit of ‘star spotting’.

‘The other night I went to all night place where artists congregate, for beer and food, and had a table near [the writer] Beverley Nichols. He is what you’d imagine — long and fair and thin — in immaculate evening dress, and with the air of the very modern young man. ‘Alfred Noyes [the poet] is quite different. I went recently to hear him on religion and poetry in a lunch-hour lecture af St Martin’s-in-the-Fields. He has a lovely voice and recites poetry like an angel, but he has also an illogical mind. His matter was horrible. It interested me to hear him say Shakespeare’s greatest line was ‘Ab- sent thee from felicity awhile.’ I shouldn’t have thought it. He is fat and very forty-ish, with a few hairs pulled across a quite bald head, wears large glasses and double-breasted suits. It seems a pity, for the’ author of [the play] ‘Sherwood.’–

For ‘native-born’ Ruth, London was a place of firsts, of seeing sights and artwork hitherto read about in books; the subject of daydreams. There was an exhibition of artwork, murals by Frank Brangwyn commissioned by The House of Lords as a memorial to the Great War ‘Quite the acme of my artistic life here have been the Brangwyn Panels’, Ruth continued.   They were, originally painted for the walls of one of the galleries in the House of Lords as a war memorial, and range from ten to twenty feet in height. The Lords could not see that they were a war memorial, and turned them down after the artist, Brangwyn put nearly ten years’ work in them’. Only five of the eighteen proposed were completed.  The Brangwyn Murals have been uncovered by devotees of lost art….I have found three – also published via the web.

Here are three of the murals Ruth saw at the exhibition.

Ruth Thomas continued: “He strikes the note of actual warfare only, in relation to all living. The riot of life, struggle for power, parasitism and greed, sex, mother love, and pleasure are all portrayed in a most exotic symbolism and the brightest and most exhilarating of greens, blues and oranges. He contemplated, too, a modern panel, with industrialism and luxury in contrast, but there is only a rough sketch of it. It is now thought they will be bought by America and the Lords wont wake up until 2050”.

In September 1937 Ruth Thomas returned to Australia to attend the New Education Fellowship Conference then being held across Australia – after an initial stint in New Zealand. Susan Isaacs, a follower of Melanie Klein, was a keynote speaker. By this time Ruth was on the staff of the London Child Guidance Clinic.

When war broke out in 1939 Ruth Thomas was amongst those recruited by Dame Evelyn Fox to advise on the needs of evacuated children. Others included the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. As had Winnicott, Ruth Thomas addressed ‘ordinary mothers’ on the needs of children via the BBC. By 1943 she was in charge of a children’s home in Pusey in Wiltshire. She wrote a memo which was included in the  1946 ‘Curtis Report’ – “Children Without Homes”. Its recommendations instrumental in the development of substitute care in the United Kingdom – and a decade later in Australia, in the Victorian State Government’s 1954 Children’s Welfare Act.  after the war. These all brought her into contact with Anna Freud who was also working with displaced children, including a group from European Concentration camps.  There were practical considerations alongside the psychological. Money and goods were scarce. Ruth sought contributions from the folk at home. One such was published in 1947.

Miss Thomas desires clothing that may no longer be needed -knitted woollies, jumpers and cardigans, little boys’ trousers, socks, underwear and old cloth ing that could be cut down. Parcels may be sent to “Miss Ruth Thomas, I Cornwall Gar dens, London S.W. 7.” They must not exceed 11pounds ( weight) or £5 in value, must not contain over 21b. of knitting wool, must be clearly marked “Gift” and a statement must be attached giving details and value. The sending of piece goods in parcels to England is prohibited.

When Anna Freud began a training program at her clinic in 1947, Ruth Thomas was appointed as a training analyst and as a lecturer. In an appreciation published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy  after her death in 1983 it was noted that ‘her seminars on ego and ego development were models of clarity’. She was much sought as a supervisor; was tough, kindly with high expectations of her students….

There is always going to be migration to and fro, knowledge transmission leaving and coming to Australian shores. Perhaps it is a manifestation of transnationalism, and, as Australian historians begin to explore the possibilities within this concept, it implies a movement away from a defensively assertive independence as the influence of the mother-country is to be shaken away to recognition that we are part of something rather more global….

References:

Kenneth Brill and Ruth Thomas, Children In Homes, London, Victor Gollancz, 1970.

E. E. Model, Ruth Thomas 1902–1983: An appreciation,Journal of Child Psychotherapy, Volume 9, Issue 1, 1983.

The Daily News, 30 June 1933, p.8.

The West Australian, 29 October 1933.

The West Australian, 24  September 1937.

The West Australian, 20 February 1948, p.15.

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Ivy Bennett – Western Australia.

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in Australian Women in Psychoanalysis

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My trawl through   the National Library’s site, Trove, has enabled some interesting figures to emerge. One of these was the  Australian born psychoanalyst Ivy Bennett – now Ivy Gwynne-Thomas.  In the 1940s, 50s and probably the 60s scholarships of all kinds enabled  country kids to get an education – whether high school or often enough, University. And so it was with Ivy Bennett.  Born on 12 August 1919 in Wagin, a small wheat-belt farming community in Western Australia, she was the fifth child in a family of six. She grew up in Lake Grace, was one of seventeen pupils at a one-roomed, one-teacher school before gaining a scholarship to Albany High School in southern Western Australia. On her matriculation she  gained a Hackett Bursary to study Modern Literature at the University of Western Australia.

As she related to a journalist at Perth’s Sunday Mail in July 1950  it was ‘out of curiosity’ she picked a psychology unit to round off her degree and fell into a psychology career. A second Hackett award – a postgraduate Scholarship – enabled her to study for a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology. Plans for further study in the United States were deferred when war was declared. In about 1942 she was tapped to teach psychology to airforce recruits at the University of Western Australia.

In 1946  a British Council Scholarship took her London and eventually enabled study for her Doctorate at The University of London and at the Anna Freud Clinic. The Western Australian press followed this part of her voyage, reporting her progress on each of her annual visits to Australia. She was young, attractive, representative of hope for the future. By 1950 it was clear that she wanted to train as a psychoanalyst and was planning to return home to work in Perth.  She was able to  extend her  scholarship to train as a lay analyst at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis and returned home, finally in January 1953.  She established her practice as a psychoanalyst from a house near King’s Park in the centre of the city in August 1953.

Although Ivy Bennett completed her doctorate in 1951 it was not until 1960 that she published it  under the title,  Neurotic and Delinquent Children (London, Tavistock Publications). Her research project, begun  under psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander’s supervision, sought to draw together her experience in experimental psychology and her interest in psychoanalysis. It was one step towards developing, in twentyfirst century parlance, an ‘evidence base’ for psychoanalysis – and understanding the influence of family and social circumstances as cause for mental health problems. For the historian, Ivy Bennett’s lucid exposition of work undertaken in the ‘child guidance’ arena by early practitioners who drew on Freud’s work to develop their programs,  shows Freud’s theories to be widening in scope and application during the first half of the twentieth century. W A White’s and Healy’s work with ‘delinquent chidlren’ in the United States aslo drew on that of Freud’s  contemporary, August Aichhon, who established one of the first child guidance clinics in Vienna during the 1920s.

In England Ivy Bennet also unequivocably affiliated with Anna Freud. She was the first student at Kate Friedlanders Child Guidance Centre at West Sussex – also under the supervision of Anna Freud. She drew primarily from  work of  Freud and Anna Freudians Dorothy Burlingham and Kate Friedlander as well as Cyril Burt to formulate her ideas about the causes of delinquency and neuroses in children.  Together with psychoanalyst Kate Freidlander Ivy Bennett designed a project aiming to  study the factors underlying the  presenting problems in a cohort of children she treated at the West Sussex Child Guidance Clinic. Friedlander’s untimely death in 1949 left Ivy Bennett to continue the project alone.

Ivy Bennett’s  argument, that understanding the causes of maladjustment was central to treatment, was central to her thesis. In her book an early paragraph reads,

The establishment of greater precision in our psychological understanding of the causation and development of maladjustment will possibly prove more important in the future than the invention and multiplication of remedial measures and new types of “treatment”. All these latter aim, in effect, at giving the child a new kind of human relationship to replace that which has contributed so greatly to the thwarting or distortion of his development in the past. ( Bennett, 1960, pp.3-4).

It was not about moulding a child’s character, Ivy Bennett argued. Research had revealed that developments in early infancy, if not in intrauterine life,  were expressed in later stages of a child’s development. Although she does not explicitly acknowledge the work of Melanie Klein whose work was influential in this respect, nor that of John Bowlby or the independent Donald Winnicott, her inclusion of their publications in her bibliography suggests she was well aware of their work. Ivy Bennett was also following developments psychoanalytic thinking as it moved away from psychosexual factors Freud had maintained were central to child development. The capacity to manage aggression was integral to the successful development of a child, Ivy Bennett argued. She wrote,’The problem of delinquency ‘is at bottom, that of dealing with uncivilised aggression beyond the control of society and often under the individual’s own control’. The understanding the phenomenon of Aggression – in delinquency and normal life – was a particular key, far more important than solving the ‘urgent practical clinical problems involving primitive and unsocialised aggression’. ( Bennett, pp.31-33). She  stressed the ‘importance of the role of consistency and continuity in the education and training of the child’. It involved understanding and working with the child’s family – parents and grandparents – as well as a child’s teachers and her community.

The War had .seen a shift amongst British psychoanalystsfrom theoretical emphasis on psychosexual factors  to aggression in the aetiology of neuroses and delinquency. Although Ivy Bennett was signalling a shift in her thinking away from Freud’s psychosexual theories as central to the aetiology of delinquent and neurotic children, she appears to have been dubious, or at least choosing not to move away from it altogether.  There was still more research to be undertaken about the role of aggression. The emerging field of group analysis would contribute. Illumination would come from advancing research in social psychology, cultural anthropology as well as in psychoanalysis. At this stage Ivy Bennett sustained her Freudian roots, writing

A blending, fusion and diffusion of both sexual and aggressive impulses takes place and is always present in the emotional sub-strata of community living. The success or failure of this blending or balance determines the varied nature of social life, both in its constructive and in its negative dissocial forms.  (Bennett, 1960, p. 32)

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It may be that Ivy Bennett was part of a larger plan for Western Australians. In the early 1940s there had been a dream for  Perth  to lead psychoanalysis in Australia.  In 1943 the Perth Branch of the British Medical Association apparently drew up plans to establish the largest analytic training institute in the southern hemisphere at the University of Western Australia. This was the outcome of four years work. In 1939 psychologist Bill McCrae, well known to  the Australian public as a cricketer,  returned from the United States where he had studied psychoanalysis. Perhaps prevented from pursuing training due to the US practice of restricting analytic training to medical practitioners, McCrae began to work  to establish a training program for lay psychoanalysts.  He  began lecturing and writing  highlighting the  usefulness of psychoanalysis in education and ‘mental treatment’. He worked in conjunction with local medical practitioners, lectured at the Adult Education Board and, with the support of the medical fraternity, encouraged the teaching of psychology at the University from an analytic point of view. Potentially these lay analysts  would work along with the medical profession. A journalist from Perth’s Sunday Times newspaper appears to have drawn from the planning documents, writing:

The programme envisaged includes a school with analytically trained teachers from kindergarten to leaving standard, a wide scheme of adult and parent education, a clinic to be conducted on a no profit basis, a maternity hospital and eventually a Psychoanalytic Institute for the training of practitioners.

Further research is needed to understand these events and whether Ivy Bennett had a place in this. After all here was a youngish, attractive, talented and ambitious woman who was potentially well placed to contibute to such  developments. At the very least it may well be that the war meant that McCrae’s idea was permanently shelved. It appears though that such was the interest in psychoanalysis at academic and government circles that Ivy Bennett’s proposal undertake training in England was accepted by the British Council who funded her.

Ivy Bennett’s efforts to establish herself as a lay analyst  in Australia appear to have been disappointing. She made efforts to connect with colleagues in the Eastern States and was a founding member of the Australian Society of Psychoanalysts. She presented papers at conferences of the Melbourne Insitute of Psychoanalsyis. She left Australia in 1958 to work towards full membership of the International Psychoanalytical Society.

‘I trained to that level so I could have independent recognition in Australia, she told Michelle Slarke. The profession was ‘still dominated by the prejudices I had to fight all the way – the prejudices of medical and insurance authorities against women and lay analysts’.  (Slarke, 2003, p. 51). Marriage intevened. I understand that she had thoughts of returning to Australia but it was her husband’s professional opportunities that took her to Kansas in the United States where she was instrumental in the establishment of psychoanalytic training in that state. She also remembered her days at Lake Grace and has established a scholarship at the local high school to enable a young person to realise their dreams. Too..

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