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

11 Thursday Sep 2014

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

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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

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

22 Thursday Sep 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting….

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