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Freud in Oceania

~ Histories of psychology and psychoanalysis in the Oceania region

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Susan Isaacs and The New Education Fellowship Conference, August, 1937

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Susan Isaacs

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Child psychology, Child Welfare, children, hidden history of psychoanalysis in Australia, infant mental health, New Education Fellowship conference, Susan Isaacs

Susan Isaacs’ visit to the Antipodes in July, August and September 1937, occupies little more than several pages in biographies about her life and work published so far. But for Australians and New Zealanders it was a rare opportunity. Isaacs’ visit was larger than the New Education Fellowship Conference of which she was a key lecturer even through The conference itself was one of the most significant events in interwar Australia. Throughout the press across Australia Isaacs is recorded as speaking to full houses. She is the delegate who is chosen to be photographed with a koala. Her reunion with her sister after eighteen years would have touched many people who had long left family and friends behind in England. There was something very appealing and human about Susan Isaacs.

susan isaacs 1937

The Telegraph, (Brisbane)  7 August 1937, p. 8

It is hard to write a biography, or any historical work without access to sources.  Inevitably much of the focus in Isaacs’ biographies, of course, is upon her development as a psychologist and teacher in England during the 1920s and 1930s and, from the mid 1930s, as a psychoanalyst. She had completed her initial training and gained full membership of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1923. In 1927 after meeting Melanie Klein, she entered analysis with another analyst Joan Riviere so as to understand for herself the meaning of Kleinian thinking. Her ability to  argue for the  importance of Klein’s position during the ‘Controversial Discussions’ within the British Psychoanalytical Society during the  early 1940s, and show that unconscious phantasy influences daily life in all people, also led to her seminal paper, ‘The Nature and Function of Phantasy’, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1943.

Isaacs visit to Australia could be said to have been a significant event in her life, if not her development. Travel was hard in the 1930s. The effort and time needed   meant that such journeys to Australia from England for short periods as several months rather than several years were rare. And Australia was so far away. Dorothy Gardner, Isaacs’ first biographer and a former student, may have suffered from lack of access to sources. Although her visit to Australia is well documented in Australian newspapers, Isaacs did not keep such press clippings for posterity. Had she done so, Gardner would have found records of her speeches, her social engagements and most significantly for Isaacs, her reunion with her younger sister, Alice, who had emigrated to Australia with her husband eighteen years earlier. Gardner’s 1969 account generally highlights the opportunity for Isaacs to renew friendships in the United States. Gardner relates that in New York Isaacs was the guest of the Child Study Association and had the opportunity to travel to Berkeley in California where research was being carried out. In New Zealand Isaacs lectured to audiences in Auckland and Wellington, and Gardner guesses, ”she certainly visited Christchurch and probably the other cities” (p. 116).She was greatly admired by Mr Campbell, the Head of Education in New Zealand, but there is little information about the issues that concerned New Zealand, and Australian, audiences that had resulted in such interest in her work.

Philip Graham, Isaacs 2013 biographer, has little more detail to add. He notes that several delegates, including Isaacs, did not hesitate to criticize the Australian education system. Their recommendations were taken up and used to reform Australian education so that it became more relevant to the two countries, he continues. An important point, also underlined by historian John Godfrey in his 2004 article on the Conference, is the very strong interest in the conference among the Australian public. One motivation for the Conference was the recognition among educators, government and politicians that Australian education was in need of revival.  In his introduction to the Conference proceedings, K S Cunningham of the Australian Council of Education Research, noted that ‘owing no doubt to our remote and somewhat sheltered situation in the world, we had failed to keep up with this forward movement that featured in other parts of the world. This stressed the liberal view of the school’s function in a democratic community, and ‘a recognition of how great a part popular education must play in promoting, not only the well being of individuals, but also the security and well being of nation as a whole’, (Cunningham, 1938, p. 1). Godfrey’s article might be ‘breathless’ in tone, as Graham caustically remarks, but for those in the Antipodes, the conference was part of a larger process of developing Australian nationhood. Rather than remaining dependent upon the old country for direction, Australian educationists sought to develop a system suited to local needs.  The critique provided by Isaacs and her colleagues was sought, if not understood to be part of the arrangement during their visit.

Isaacs was chosen for this role because she was  known to Australian audiences for her work as Principle of the Malting House School where she used the opportunity to record the children’s play and conversations – the basis of her books,  and Intellectual Growth in Young Children, were favourably reviewed in education and psychology circles. In January 1933 the West Australian newspaper published a reviews of The Nursery Years and The Children we Teach was a shorter version of Isaacs’ The Intellectual Growth of Young Children,  was reviewed by  a month later.  Although not named, the author of both items was likely to have been either Professor Cameron, Head of Education at the University of Western Australia or Professor Fowler, who led the Psychology department.  Isaacs’ book, ‘Social Development in Young Children also carefully reviewed in the West Australian, in November 1933. Isaacs’ points, that children had individual, emotional lives of their own, that all behaviour had meaning and that this could be understood in terms of children’s psychical development and internal phantasy life, were new ideas for people brought up with the notion that the task of a parent was to train and mould children into adulthood.

It is not as if Isaacs’ ideas about education were unknown, generally. When South Australian psychologist and educationist, Lois Allen returned in 1928 after nine years in England, her experience as a teacher at Malting House for two terms  was impressed upon readers of the Adelaide News. Allen stressed the recognition and enablement of the differing abilities of each of the children.  Perhaps this idea was not as ‘taken for granted’ in 1928 where rote learning was the norm, as it is in the twentyfirst century.  Malting House, Allen explained,

was a small experimental school for research and the children were between three and eight years of age. The object was to study the problems of children with a view to making better use of the natural curiosity with which those this age are endowed. They were allowed to investigate the realities of nature and had a little laboratory where they experimented with crucibles, bunsen burners, and so on, so that knowledge of scientific phenomena might be instilled in the early years. Among the children was a grandson of Sir Ernest Rutherford, the noted physicist. It was most interesting to notice the extreme difference between the children, and to observe the trend of each mind towards artistic or scientific subjects.

Isaacs had her own reasons for accepting the invitation to visit Australia from the Australian Council of Education Research. Professionally she was interested in Aboriginal culture and what might be learned about the human mind. She was deeply familiar with the work of Geza Roheim and later lectured on this to students of psychoanalysis. A second, more personal reason was the opportunity to see her younger sister Alice who had emigrated to Australia shortly after her marriage eighteen years earlier. The two travelled together for part of the tour, at least and in Brisbane stayed together in accommodation at the Women’s College at Kangaroo Point. Isaacs had been ill with cancer during 1935 and 1936. It was a rare opportunity to see her beloved sister and to take time from her psychoanalytic  work.

There were opportunities for Isaacs, too. She had the opportunity to broacast several of her talks to people living in remote rural areas – the outback. At the end of her Brisbane stay Isaacs reflected that

In England, there Is not such a thing as a woman radio announcer, and one- of the ‘moat pleasant recollections I will take away from Queensland will be of a broadcast talk I gave from the national station to the Country Women’s Association last Thursday, during which I had how wisely the Influence of the women’s session was being used to benefit the women of Queensland.

There were further opportunities for radio broadcasting, in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Universty of Adelaide. Perhaps Isaacs’ appeal, along with the intellectual integrity she brought to her work, was that she spoke to people about the very real concern of raising children. Her efforts to translate complex psychological ideas into plain English, the research which underpinned her analyses and her preparedness to communicate in a variety of ways contributed to peoples’ desire to learn more about thinking, human development and relationships. She spoke about infant development, telling audiences about the investigations that were occurring into the mental life of infants. Her concern, to help people to think about children’s behavior, found audiences in unexpected places.

REFERENCES

BOOK REVIEWS. PSYCHOLOGY OF CHILDREN. “The Children We Teach,” by Susan Isaacs, M.A., D.Sc. University of London Press.The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954) Saturday 21 January 1933 p 4 Article

BOOK REVIEWS. (1933, February 25). The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – 1954), p. 4. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32488480

BOOK REVIEWS. (1933, November 25). The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 – Preview Post1954), p. 4. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article32774408

Psychology of Infants. (1937, August 4). The Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. : 1872 – 1947), p. 9 Edition: CITY FINAL LAST NEWS. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184565332

When a Child Is Obstinate And Defiant. (1937, August 5). The Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. : 1872 – 1947), p. 10 Edition: CITY FINAL LAST MINUTE NEWS. Retrieved June 4, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184565910

The Telegraph, ( Brisbane, Qld: 1872-1947) Saturday 7 August 1937, page 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184564179 accessed 3 June 2015.

Cunningham, K S, ed; (1938), Education for Complete Living: The Challenge of Today – The Proceedings of the New Education Fellowship Conference held in Australia August 1, 1937 – Setpember 20, 1937, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1938.

Gardner, D E M ( 1969), Susan Isaacs: The First Biography, London, Methuen Educational Ltd.

Godfrey, Johm (2004), Perhaps the most important and certainly the most exciting event in the whole history of education in Australia. History of Education Review, 33, 45-58.

Graham, Philip,( 2013) Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children, London, Karnac

Theatre For Children and the Freudian Influence – A Guest Posting from Dr John McIntyre

11 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by Christine in 1930s, Children's Theatre, Education, Susan Isaacs

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childhood, children, contributions of emigres to Australian Culture, New Education, Psychoanalysis in Education and Theatre, refugees, Rosemarie Benjamin, Susan Isaacs, Sydney Children's Theatre, Theatre in education, what have we found here?

I am delighted to introduce my first guest posting. Dr John McIntyre, a Canberra based education research and policy consultant  and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra has kindly accepted my invitation to write a post for this blog. His subject is Rosemary Benjamin and influence of Susan Isaacs in Sydney’s Theatre for Children during the 1930s.

A brief exploration through Google shows that John McIntyre has worked for over 25 years in the professional preparation of adult and vocational educators at the University of Technology Sydney where he was a senior researcher and Director in the UTS Research Centre for Vocational Education and Training.  His research has focused on outcomes and participation in ACE in Australia, much of it commissioned by government. He has also published work on early school leavers and equity strategies of VET providers, research methodology and policy and research relationships in adult education.His recent work includes ‘Client engagement in a learner-centred system’ and a feasibility study on a national internet portal for adult learners. In 2007 he evaluated the Victorian ACE Research Circles for the  Adult, Community and Further Education Board, Engagement, Knowledge and Capability:Connecting Research and Policy to Practice. These and other publications can be found on his website.

John McIntyre is also deeply interested in theatre and the arts. After reading my posts about Susan Isaacs’ Australian tour in 1937 here and here, John contacted me with information about Rosemary Benjamin and the influence of Susan Isaacs’ thinking in the the Children’s Theatre Benjamin created in Sydney during the 1930s. You can find some more about Benjamin at this lovely site: http://www.artpages.com.au

Here is John McIntyre’s post….

Recently I have been exploring the history of the Theatre for Children, Sydney,  that was founded and directed for one twenty years by an Englishwoman of Jewish background, Rosemary Benjamin (1901-1957).

Arriving in Sydney in late 1936, Benjamin soon made friends with Jewish emigrés from Europe including the Finkes, the psychoanalysts whose daughter Ruth acted in the theatre, Gertrud Bodenwieser, the leading exponent of expressionist dance and composer and musician Sydney John Kaye (Kurt Kaiser). Rosemarie Benjamin is another link in the story of ‘Freud in Oceania’.

By the time she began her Sydney work, Rosemarie Benjamin had developed her ideas about appropriate theatrical performance for children, ideas formed by early twentieth century progressive education and profoundly influenced by Freudian thinking in London of the 1930s. For Benjamin’s generation, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious enriched new ideas of play, creativity and development and contributed to the ferment of the ’new education’ in a way that is now hard to appreciate.

Benjamin believed that children’s theatre should be authentic, performed as serious theatre by adult actors in plays and draw deeply upon myth and fairy-tale. Through such theatre, children could encounter their inner conflicts in symbolic terms, identifying with characters expressing ‘difficult’ emotions of guilt, fear, anxiety and horror. Allegorical figures drawn from myth could act as intermediaries in this cathartic process.  Authentic theatre understood in this way could serve the expressive needs of children and ‘child development’.  These ideas are outlined fully in Benjamin’s ‘Story of the Theatre for Children’ (available on-line at the State Library of Victoria).

In the years 1925-1936 Benjamin as a young woman was working as a play organiser for the London County Council, a new kind of educational work, while seriously pursuing a career in drama, twin strands that eventually merged in children’s theatre. Benjamin’s narrative always highlights her 1930s visit to Soviet Russia to study children’s theatre as a life-changing experience, though her explanations of children’s theatre are wholly Freudian.

Who influenced this Freudian strand in Benjamin’s thinking? In 1930s London, Benjamin must have come in contact with the leading edge of Freudian thought as it was being absorbed in progressive education, when Susan Isaacs was coming to prominence. Though direct evidence in Benjamin’s papers is lacking, I think there are three clear indications of Isaacs’ influence:

  •  Benjamin emphasises emotions, especially difficult emotions (fear, guilt, anxiety, aggression) and the way these can be called forth in expressive play. Theatre employing plays based on myths and fairy tales permits children to encounter and deal symbolically with such forces. A broad understanding of phantasy (as it was later outlined by Isaacs in her famous 1948 article) appears to be assumed.
  • Isaacs discovered that ‘new education’ rather than being wholly permissive, children need to have a structured context to help them manage the expression of difficult emotions. Benjamin is insistent that theatre performances need to be structured with devices that help the child to respond to reactions aroused by the play. Such devices include allegorical figures like ‘Jester’ that ‘come in front of the curtain’ act as intermediaries between the real world and the fantastic world of the play. 
  • There is a commitment to systematic observational of children’s experiences as a way of testing and informing theoretical understandings. Benjamin encouraged audience participation and practised the serious study of children’s responses to characters to inform the crafting of performance. Underlying this is a strong conviction about the developmental value of children’s theatre.

It may also be that Susan Isaacs (as a columnist and educator) gave Benjamin the inspiration to promote new ideas to the wider audience, for Benjamin was a tireless advocate of her cause, and quite possibly a better publicist than producer. 

At the end of 1936, Benjamin left London for a Sydney holiday. By then, Isaacs was leading the new department of child development at University of London and had published two defining works in the field. She was a leading figure in the New Education Fellowship which the next year held its World Congress in Australian cities, with Isaacs as a key member. 

In Sydney, Benjamin no doubt participated in the Congress, and she was on the NSW committee of the NEF until the war years. This World Congress contributed much to enthusiasm for new educational thinking in Australia, and this took place alongside other streams of cultural modernism permeating the Antipodes. Benjamin must found among her Jewish emigré friends a congenial milieu in which her own novel enterprise might prosper. She returned briefly to Europe after the war for a study tour, but after resuming her work in Sydney suffered a long illness before she died in London in 1957.

Enquiries: John McIntyre, john@artpages.com.au

References

Benjamin (c1949)  ‘The Story of the Theatre for Children’. FilmStrip NSW. On-line at

digital.slv.vic.gov.au/dtl_publish/pdf/marc/3/2125895.html).

Free Education. Profile of Susan Isaacs. http://free-educations.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/educator-profile-susan-isaacs-18851948.html

McIntyre, J. (2014). Rosemarie Benjamin and the Theatre for Children in Sydney, 1937-1957. [Journal article, submitted]. Available at http://www.artpages.com.au/Theatre_for_Children/Theatre_For_Children.html

About Looking After Children in Hospital – 1953

20 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by Christine in 1950s, Bowlby and Attachment Theory, Children in Hospital, Conferences and Lectures, Newspaper reportage, Public debate

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Attachment Theory, Childhood trauma, children, Children in Hospital, John Bowlby, Medical Profession, World Health Organisation

In my previous post I noted that Hungarian born and trained psychoanalyst Dr Andrew Peto was a speaker at Sydney’s twelve day Pacific Seminar on Mental Health in Childhood  in August 1953. Sponsored by the World Health Organisation with sixty delegates – medical practitioners, teachers, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers -.from sixteen  west Pacific and South East Asian countries it was a talkfest on child psychology not seen before. The director of the seminar was Dr. F. W. Clements lecturer in child health at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the Universality of Sydney and  formerly chief of the Nutrition Section of W.H.O.  The purpose of the seminar was to  consider those forces in the child’s home and communal life that could help or hinder him in his growth towards a mature personality’. Curiously this international Congress was scarcely reported even though delegates were considering the leading research of the day. Melbourne’s Argus newspaper provided a brief overview of the conference under the heading: Experts have some cute ideas of how They’d Bring Up Mother” concluding that at the very least, professionals were better informed.The Sydney Morning Herald relegated the matter to the Women’s Pages with a major article on women doctors from South East Asia. In a thinly veiled attack upon these highly qualified professional women, the Herald wondered why they were not at home tending their children and carrying out household tasks.  Only one of the major Australian women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly contributed a well thought out item about a topic  covered during the conference about the needs of  children in hospital. As you will see the author, Veronica West, drew upon newly published Attachment research by John Bowlby and James Robertson.   West carefully negotiated some contentious issues between doctors and reformers.Thanks to the National Library of Australia’s website TROVE, we are able to read these articles easily. West wrote:

Are Australian hospitals mending the bodies of sick children while blindly subjecting their minds to emotional stress more damaging in many cases than the disease or condition from which they are suffering? Must the price of the child’s health be submission to an inflexible hospital routine which catapults him from the security of home to a world in which his two paramount fears are realised – desertion by his parents, injury at the hands of strangers? Is Australia to lag behind progressive English and American hospitals which encourage the presence of mothers at the bedside of their sick children? Many medical and hospital representatives who attended the Seminar on Mental Health in Childhood at Sydney University last August are asking themselves these questions.A few enlightened paediatricians (child specialists) and doctors have long been trying to introduce overseas reforms in Australia. The safeguarding of children from unnecessary, frightening experience and training the nursing staff in basic concepts of child psychology are other steps, being taken abroad.First to throw down an official challenge to the old hospital visiting system is the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. It now proudly announces the success of a scheme which makes hospital routine fit in with new daily visiting hours for mothers.

This article was set in motion by the distress of a friend who spent two weeks in an intermediate ward of a city hospital. She said she couldn’t forget the despairing cries of “Mummy, Mummy, where are you?” which she heard from a nearby children’s ward throughout the night. She was astounded to hear that mothers were only allowed to visit the children once a week. When my friend spoke to the night sister about the distress of the children, her anxiety for them was dismissed as maternal sentiment.

“Nonsense!” said the sister, “a sedative soon puts them to sleep. The kiddies are always like this for a couple of days after visiting days. We dread visiting days. They do more harm than good.” My friend was told that except for a few problem cases the children were perfectly happy with the nurses during the week. “They are quiet and good, and settled in, but as soon as mother comes they stage terrific tantrums.” When she told me the story my friend said that if her own child went to hospital and was as mentally distressed as some of the children she had seen and heard, she would insist, through her doctor, on reasonable access to her little girl. Was my friend being over maternal and foolish, or was she instinctively right? Í set about finding out.

West attended the Seminar on Childhood Mental Health in Sydney in August 1953. She wrote,

The Seminar on Mental Health in Childhood revealed something of the general impact of hospital experience on the child of pre-school age. Subjects discussed included depriving the child of the comfort of his mother’s presence, his fear of pain, the isolation and aimlessness of his existence, the uncertainty of ever getting home again, and the inner turmoil and emotional drive to which frail bodies were subjected.With two-year-olds or three year-olds, especially, it was pointed out, the immediate reaction was a period of agitated despair, during which the child screamed, refused food, and only exhaustion brought sleep. After i a few days he became the quiet, good, allegedly settled-in child-in reality the apathetic, frozen-emotion child who had reached a serious stage of mental sickness...Sir Ronald Mackeith, of Guy’s Hospital, London, told of reforms which remove the risk of hospital damage to the child’s personality. One of the simplest was the opening of wards to mothers, who fed, bathed, and generally assisted the staff in the care of their own child on their visits. The Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, I discovered, had been experimenting with daily visiting for the smaller children over the past two years, had found this a success, and had introduced regular daily visiting for all children four months ago. The Medical Director, Dr. Vernon Collins, said that he regards the ideal as “free visiting where the parents may come to the hospital at any time.” He believes that this is essential to build up good relation ship between the mother and the nursing staff and to get the best care for the child.

Quoting this as an example, I interviewed leading paediatricians, medical men, child psychologists, hospital medical superintendents, matrons and sisters. I found the paediatriciains and doctors awake to recent research and already trying to apply the new methods to their patients, but still uncertain ol how general reforms could be carried out. Their reactions were surprisingly mixed, with individual but not collective antagonism to the new methods. Some had not heard of  visiting – hour reforms, and wary of the threat to hospital routine, were reluctant to hear of, or discuss, the subject. Others equally ill-informed listened kindly, but remained unshaken in their conviction that present methods were best. As an official spokesman put it, they were “sitting pat and waiting.”

West seems unimpressed by that response. She continued:  Here is the statement of the official spokesman of that hospital-the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, Sydney, which has 485 beds and treated 11,777 in-patients last year…

“Just say we are interested in the entire subject and an studying all the material available, but we prefer to wait and see. There will be no immediate alteration in the Sunday visiting day for the children.”

Here, too, are some of the opinions expressed at interviews: First, a talk with a hospital matron with many years’ experience in children’s wards. “I think the reforms will have to come,” she said. “The seminar undoubtedly opened the eyes of some of us who have long prided ourselves on the physical care of children in our charge. The most efficiently run ward in Sydney is not worth the constant reproach of the screams of the frenzied child, or the misery and listless apathy of the quiet child, star ing blankly, hour after hour at hospital walls.”

The most outspoken of the pediatricians who recently returned from England and who had instituted more liberal visiting hours in his hospital outside London said this: “Christmas is coming, and we will again have Press photographs of happy children and gaily decorated ward:and once again people will murmur warmly, ‘The hospitals are wonderful going to so much trouble for the children!’ “What the enlightened child expert would like is a little of this Christmas sentiment from hospitals and doctors spread over twelve months in our children’s wards.“When I was a medical resident I agreed with the general opinion that the weekly visiting day for mothers, with its aftermath of temperatures up and chaos in the wards, was an unnecessary evil. “Experience brought wisdom. In the London hospital I arranged for the mothers to visit the children daily, dropping in and out for brief visits on the way to town or after shopping.”The mothers sometimes fed the children, tidied beds washed them, and were of real assistance to the nursing staff. Reassured by the seemingly casual visits of the mothers the children were happy and contented, and were discharged mentally and physically well. “Certainly some cried when their mothers left, just as children here in our private ward« who enjoy the. privileges of more frequent visiting do. But a little weeping at temporary parting is one of our natural human emotions. It bears no relation to the violent reactions, or, worse, the disturbingly quiet ones, of the visit-starved public-ward child. Of course, we must have hospitals for sick children, and any physical pain inflicted is negligible to the suffering it spares the child, but too often both doctors and parents undertake to put a child into hospital without giving sufficient thought to the matter”.

The Doctor continued: “Some parents fall down on ‘he job of preparing the child for what lies ahead. They, in mistaken kindness, tell him fairy stories or refer to his approaching period in hospital as a ‘party.’ “What happens when the child arrives for the ‘party’?

“Generally he is whisked away from his harassed mother at the admission office, and, stripped of his favorite teddy bear or chewing rug, he is jet propelled into his new world. For the next six days until visiting day he is walled up in a world of white, forsaken bv his parents, helpless against the towering, white-clad, masked strangers who periodically select him for injury. It is not the pain-most children can take pain better than adults-it is the terror of what it is all about that breaks the child. While the comfort of the sympathetic nurse is often refused by the child in his des- pair, the reprimands and threats of the thoughtless, ill tempered nurse aggravate the situation. “Some of our hospitals allow the mother to accompany the child to his bed, get him used to the nurse, as well as letting him keep his cherished toys.

“In others where haste and ordered routine is the rule the opposite is the case. In many of these hospitals it is still the current practice on chaotic tonsillectomy morning to line up about a dozen young patients on a form out- side their ward or adjoining the theatre for upwards of an hour, and drag them off one by one.. for the operation.”

A woman pediatrician had this to say: “‘Certainly periods in hospital do not affect all children, temporarily or permanently. This is also true of epidemics, yet we would not deliberately expose children to such a risk, I believe a system of staggered daily visiting hours would be best, with full co- operation between the doctor in charge and the sister. Of course, some mothers because of domestic duties or because they live a long way from the hospital would not be able to make the daily visit.”

And what of the position in hospitals or wards where the children may stay months or even years? Two doctors stressed the need for closer contact between mothers and children in such hospitals.

“I commend any doctor or parent about to confine a child to one of these hospitals to study Bowlby’s report to the World Health Organisation***,” one of them said. “As he and the famous Sir James Spence point out, these hospitals, despite the various activities, occupations, and entertainments arranged for the children, overlook one important factor -the depriving of the child of his mother. Perhaps Australia cannot immediately emulate these reforms, but some of the broken mother-child relationship can be repaired by extending visiting hours.

Finally I saw child psychologist Miss Zoe Benjamin. Clinging to mother, temper tantrums, bed-wetting, hostility towards the mother, and kindergarten activities are all typical symptoms of hospital experience,” said Miss Benjamin. Handled sympathetically by parents, these usually disappear, but can lead to serious results. The experts quoted agreed that the most urgently needed reform was an increase in visiting hours in children’s hospitals, which must be championed by an enlightened medical profession generally.

I for one was surprised to find this article published as long ago as 1953. I remember attending lectures at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital during the 1980s when Isabel Menzies Lyth from the Tavistock Clinic spoke about the needs of children in hospital. Here she advocated what one 1953 Australian Matron also promoted: that the ward be divided into smaller units with children allocated to a ‘team’ of carers during their admission? It seemed, upon listening to Mezies lyth that her recommendations and their implementations were far more recent. It is to be wondered about why such a large newspaper as the Sydney Morning Herald failed to report upon this and other matters arising from this international conference. Was there some sort of external pressure upon its editorial team not to do so? It would be interesting to look into this a little more.

*** “Child Care and the Growth of Love”-Penguin edition summary of the John Bowlby report to the World Health Organisation

References:

Child Care Is Their Subject. (1953, August 20). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), p. 5 Section: Women’s Section. Retrieved April 20, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18383141

Sick children need parents at their bedside. (1953, November 25). The Australian Women’s Weekly (1933 – 1982), p. 20. Retrieved April 20, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article41447234

 

 

 

 

 

Psychoanalysis, Children In Care and Government Policy, Melbourne,Victoria, 1957

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Christine in 1950s, Government policy

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Tags

Attachment Theory, Child psychology, children, Children in Care, Curtis Report, emotional disturbance in children, Government Policy in Victoria, Influence of Psychoanalytic Theory, John Bowlby, Melbourne, State Children, State government report

In my wanderings around Melbourne’s libraries I  have stumbled upon a slim volume with a long title: Child Care Staffs in Institutions: Report on Survey Undertaken for the Children’s Welfare Advisory Council To Determine the Need for Courses of Training. It is softcovered and 111 pages in length, including eight appendices of proposed trainings for mothercraft nurses and the staff of occupation centres. A list of some fifty odd institutions covered in the report heads the field: a mixture of government and religious based institutions, many run by Roman Catholic orders. The report was commissioned by the newly formed Children’s Welfare Advisory Council on 18 September 1956. Established simultaneously with the implementation of the 1954 Children’s Welfare Act the Council was intended to form a link between government and voluntary child care institutions: a way of getting religious and secular institutions on to the same page, maybe. Up until then the two groups had operated separately. Some were happy enough with the new arrangement. Others clearly were not: perhaps the level of co operation from these organisations – particularly Catholic run organisations – were indicative of resistance to the new order. The report was completed in 1957.The powers be thought the public should read it too, so it was  released the following year.

This report is a remarkable historical document – signalling a response to post-war developments in Britain where psychoanalytic clinicians began to articulate the needs of neglected and abandoned children in the light of their experiences with evacuated children. Britain’s 1946 Curtis Report, Children Without Homes, ( ‘Report of the Care of Children Committee’)  written by former University of Western Australia lecturer and then member of Anna Freud’s group, Ruth Thomas.

There had been problems getting it incorporated into British policies, a matter taken up in the House of Lords by Lord Iddesleigh who explained:

Many children were suffering quite unnecessarily because the adults responsible for their upbringing in the various homes and institutions were untrained. There was a most serious lack of trained child workers, and the Curtis Committee therefore established a sub-committee to investigate the whole matter of training. This committee reported, and its report was adopted by the main Committee. There are three recommendations in the Interim Report which appear to have a particular urgency. In the first place, there is the recommendation for the appointment of a Central Training Council of qualified persons representing various bodies engaged in the field of child care. The function of that Central Training Council was to survey the whole field of training, and to establish such facilities as they considered needful. 

Lord Iddesleigh, was worried about a lack of response to the Committee’s findings and that the report and the children would be  forgotten.

Criticisms made by the Curtis Report are very painful, and the revelations are shocking. It it one of the most distressing features of the local authorities’ administration of Poor Law children that very often they are kept in workhouses not for six weeks which I believe is the legal period-but for months and months and months. I do not think that I should be doing my duty if I do not read to your Lordships one brief description of the conditions that prevail in these workhouses. One paragraph in the Report says: “The smell in this room was dreadful. A premature baby lay in an opposite ward alone. This ward was very large and cold. The healthy children were housed in the ground floor corrugated hutment which had been once the old union casual ward The dayroom was large and bare and empty of all toys. The children fed, played and used their pots in this room. They ate from cracked enamel plates, using the same mug for milk and soup. They slept in another corrugated hutment in old broken black iron cots some of which had their sides tied up with cord. The mattresses were fouled and stained. On inquiry there did not appear to be any available stocks of clothes to draw on and it was said by one of the assistant nurses that ‘everything was at the laundry and did not come back.’ The children wore ankle length calico or flannelette frocks and petticoats and had no knickers. Their clothes were not clean. Most of them had lost their shoes; those who possessed shoes had either taken them off to play with or were wearing them tied to their feet with dirty string. Their faces were clean; their bodies in some cases were unwashed and stained.”

This was one of the worst cases, Lord Iddesleigh acknowledged… but coupled with Britain’s history of providing barrack type accommodation for children, his description underlined the depth of the problem. Trained people, he reckoned -(he believed this to be work for women) – would do much to move the situation beyond  what it then was.

It is a very frightening thought, my Lords, the extent to which the happiness of deprived children is confined to not very competent little clerks and minor officials, who are often over-worked, who are not specialists in their subject, and whose horizon is bounded by very petty departmental considerations.(Lord Iddesleigh, 12 December 1946, Session 1946-47,House of Lords Hansard,George VI year 11,853,Fifth Series, Volume 144, cc.882-908).

A decade later, in Victoria, Australia,  David Merritt took up the main thrust of the report as he developed his research project. He argued that the  main danger of institutional life was ‘lack of interest in the child as an individual’, and the tendency to ‘remote and impersonal relations’. The children ‘continually feel the lack of affection’, he continued. It was ‘in striking and painful contrast to the behaviour of a normal child of the same age in his parents’ home’.

Merritt echoes earlier commentary on destitute and state children. In 1909, South Australian writer and activist, Catherine Helen Spence, had made similar observations during the first interstate congress of workers amongst State Children. Her work, in turn, drew upon the work of Florence Davenport Hill whose writings on children living in orphanages and workhouses eventually published in her 1889 book Children of the State  – influenced the direction of government policy in New South Wales and South Australia.  Challenging contemporary eugenicist views of poverty and illegitimacy, Spence argued that that the quality of environmental provision was far more influential for the development of children into contributing members of society than genetic inheritance. She asserted that children who were boarded out, rather than institutionalised, generally fared better than institutionalised children, in the long term, as a result of the bond formed with their foster parents.  At the same congress, a delegate from the New South Wales State Children Relief Board also warned of the detrimental effect of institutionalisation on the individual development of the child.

Recognition of the value of boarding out, and of sustaining the bond between parent and child as much as possible, found endorsement in John Bowlby’s Attachment theory. Perhaps its research base, for Bowlby had assembled his evidence, enabled observations such as Spence’s and anecdotes such as Davenport Hill’s, to be elevated into something more scientific. The effects of maternal deprivation were spelt out afresh. Quoting from Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love ( Penguin, 1953), Merritt recorded,

The direct studies are the most numerous. They make it plain that, when deprived of maternal care, the child’s development is almost always retarded – physically, intellectually, and socially – and that symptoms of physical and mental illness may appear. Such evidence is disquieting, but sceptics may question whether the check is permanent and whether the symptoms of illness may not be easily overcome. The retrospective and follow-up studies make it clear that such optimism is not always justified and that some children are gravely damaged for life. This is a sombre conclusion, which must now be regarded as established. (Bowlby, 1953, pp.19-20, quoted in Merritt, 1956, p.14).

There was an additional warning: that the effects of deprivation arising from separation in the early years conceivably led to the formation of psychopathy and delinquency. Bowlby’s work had had its origins in clinical work at the London Child Guidance clinic. He had exchanged ideas with D.W Winnicott. It was taking time, but the swing away from views of delinquency as a result of genetic inferiority, to acceptance of notions child development contingent on parental availability and consistency, continued to gain ground steadily during the first half of the twentieth century.

What was required of institutional staff, Merritt concluded, was possession of the ‘qualities and abilities necessary to encourage normal development of each of the children in their care’. Drawing from the Care of Children Committee  Merritt listed the essential features of out of home care: (Note: Forgive the use of the masculine pronoun –  convention in 1956)

(i) Affection and personal interest; understanding of defects; care for his future; respect for his personality and regard for his self esteem.

(ii) Stability; the feeling that he can expect to remain with those who will continue to care for him until he goes out into the world on his own feet.

(iii)Opportunity of making the best of his ability and aptitudes, whatever they may be, as such opportunity is made available to the child in the normal home.

(iv)A share in the common life of a small group of people in a homely environment.

It would be interesting to see the working documents and correspondence that were part of the formation of this report; to turn the pages of the files, to note what was typed copy, what was not; to see what was said in the margin notes and asides, to observe the stuff of a busy day in public service. Who were the clergy who refused to participate, who decided that Merritt’s questionnaires were irrelevant  to their work? And who were the child care staff that became frightened that his questions masked criticism. Can we have  a sense of their ages? their years of experience? and indeed, of those who were kind and who were not? These questions belong to deeper documentary research than I can do here. We can only explore, with Merritt, some of the conditions he found in the institutions he visited and form our own questions.

David Merritt visited seventy-one institutions, each on two occasions. He interviewed staff and provided them with questionaires. He observed  the daily life of children living within the institutions: voluntary and statutory childrens homes, migration homes, babies homes, voluntary and juvenile schools, babies homes and homes for special categories of children: intellectually disabled, deaf and children suffering from spasticity. Accommodation ranged from a training farm accommodating six boys, but with but three resident at the time, up to a statutory institution with a capacity for 250 but actually accommodating 260. The most common type of accommodation was the dormitory style -with mass dining rooms. The largest dormitory was one for 50 boys. Merritt provided statistics and graphs. Of 3,204 state children in 1956 the majority -1500 – were boarded out in Children’s Homes. Only 449 were boarded out in foster homes with 129 placed without payment in foster homes. About 107 children were living in ‘Juvenile schools – having come before the courts -104 were placed in special schools in conjunction with the ‘Mental Hygiene’ department, 304 were living with relatives and the rest variously in live-in employment, hospitals, or were livingin institutions while they were treated for psychological problems.Material provision was high – fresh rooms, plenty of toys but inconsistent care.It appeared that a high proportion of children were ‘educationally retarded’, Merritt said. It was not clear whether this was a consequence of parental neglect or institutionalisation or a result of the frustrations encountered at school.

Merritt seems to have seen himself to be  faced with the problem of reconciling a system which lacked a framework for understanding the emotional, attachment needs of children and adults, with emerging ideas about the  needs of children in out of home care. At times Merritt was critical of the staff – his progressive views conflicting with the old school practicality.’Some staff members saw no problem at all – children were either “dull” or “bright” and that was that. Others were inclined to attribute poor school results to such things as ‘difficulty concentrating, sheer laziness or bad heredity’. He commented” ‘It would be true to say that a number of persons I interviewed failed to show an awareness of the needs of children in this area’.

There was failure to recognise or understand emotional disturbance in children. Merritt’s frustration is palpable when he writes of one person in charge of 100 children or more who claimed there were no emotionally disturbed children amongst them. Closer analysis revealed children from broken homes, that about 50 were wards of the state, some were illegitimate and others ‘she regarded as mentally retarded’. He continued”

When asked about the children’s behaviour she described temper tantrums, bed wetting, stuttering, wilful destructiveness, sulkiness and pilfering amongst the types of behaviour she encountered. That none of these children were emotionally disturbed and consequently had a special need for affection and understanding appears highly unlikely to say the least.

While not all institutions and staff groups were lacking in such understanding there was room for more concern for the emotional and environmental provision for children in care, Merritt concluded after his visits. In many instances  ignorance of the nature and stature of children’s’ needs, inadequate numbers of staff contributed to the malaise – a fact  noted by the British Care of Children Committee. There was a need to modify the organisational structure of such institutions, to train staff, to work to bring the situation in Victoria up to those standards practised in other parts of the world.

Despite resistance by some staff to scrutiny and training there was acceptance and a desire for change. There had been agitation in the press – about institutional conditions and about the lack of training amongst their staff. There were perceptions of abuse, that child welfare practices were not right.  In september 1952 Melbourne’s Argus newspaper had reported extensively on two fourteen year old girls had been incarcerated in the large Bluestone building Pentridge Gaol – a place for the worst criminals and the location of many executions.  That the rival Sydney press gloated that such an event as gaoling young teenage girls would not occur in its state rubbed salt into the wound.

By 1954 a new Children’s Act had been passed by parliament. Merritt’s report, drawing on the understandings provided by psychoanalytic theories and clinicians, promised much – and, at least professional training for staff. It was the beginning of a revolution.

Pedagogic Psychoanalysis – Summerhill

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Christine in educational theory, western australia

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children, education, Ideas in the 1920s, Neill, sexual repression, Summerhill

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.

 

 

Related articles
  • Summerhill school and the do-as-yer-like kids (guardian.co.uk)
  • First Mention: Sigmund Freud, 1909 (nytimes.com)
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