50th Anniversary dinner

DR. JOHN BOOTS

 

I would like to thank the Institute Council for asking me to say a few words on the occasion of our '50^th' - asking a rather circumloquacious character with heightened obsessional traits to say a few words could be construed as a serious error of judgment.  However, in all other respects Maurice and the council are to be congratulated for their forethought in reminding us of this milestone and pursuing its celebration.  Deborah and the Scientific Committee deserve our thanks for allowing this event to be housed within the Societies conference - which would seem a very natural location.

Any celebration should invite reflection.  Our celebration of survival and growth - no mean feat in an analytic organisation - acknowledges success in the shadows of conflict against a background of rapid and sometimes violent social change.

Between those forces that act towards dispersing meaning and purpose or towards retreat and isolation lies, I think, the challenge for our Institute's future.  It perhaps has always been thus - this inevitable tension.

Events over which we have no control offer opportunities for growth or involution.

We know this applies individually in the context of personal illness and trauma (of which we as a group have had our share) and collectively in the context of creative or destructive group phenomena.

We celebrate our survival in the aftermath of the recent shocking events in the United States and the less sensational but equally cataclysmic awareness of the plight of refugees fleeing persecution.  As individuals and as a group we extend our sympathies to those in pain.  Whilst as individuals and as a group we can offer support, our best remembrance continues, I think, to be in our work, which operates at the heart of human potential and human destructiveness.  How we communicate the fruits of this to others, lies at the heart of the Institutes charter.

In 1932 Albert Einstein was asked by the League of Nations, and its Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, to choose someone with whom he could have a frank exchange of views on any topic he might choose.

Einstein wrote to Freud - "Is it possible," he asked, "to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hatred and destructiveness.

"Here I am thinking," he wrote, "by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses.  Experience proves that it is rather the so-called intelligentizia that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its earliest synthetic form upon the printed page."

In his reply to Einstein ("Why War", Vienna, Sept. 1932) Freud wrote - "anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war.  In the first place they may be relations resembling those towards a loved object (though without having sexual aim) - and the second kind of emotion is by means of identification.  Whatever leads men and women to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications.  The structure of human society is to a large extent based on them."

"Why do you and I," Freud wrote to Einstein, "and so many, many other people rebel so violently against war?  Why do we not accept it as another of the many painful calamities of life?" We react to war," Freud continued, "because war puts an end to human lives that are full of hope, because it brings individual men into humiliating situations, because it compels them against their will to murder other men, and because it destroys precious material objects that have been produced by the labours of humanity."

I apologise for injecting a sober note at a time of celebration - you can always count on an analyst to take the bubbles out of a party.  But against a background of increasing international menace and tragedy, Freud and Einstein's correspondence regarding human conflict and their extrapolations from psychic life to group conflict, carry a timeless message.

Psychoanalysis and the societies and institutes that house their work are no strangers to tragedy and persecution - nor even to engaging in a spot of persecution in their own right.  Their existence - and ours - rests on a capacity to deal with those conflicts inherent in growth and diversity, the rich integration of different professional disciplines, and continued social relevance.

When it has not been engaged in its own "brand of warfare", the Sydney Institute has provided a base, and now an actual home, for the nurture of psychoanalytic practice and the promulgation of its thinking, in the wider community.  It was born on a wave of enthusiasm and hope - that psychoanalysis offered a new way of addressing the conflicts and deficits in individual psychology and their repercussions in human exchange.

It's ongoing life has relied on this passion, enthusiasm and sacrifice; its future ultimately  lies in the profound and unique nature of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind, a method of treatment and a vehicle for research but it is what happens between analyst and analysand that lies at the very centre of questions about our longevity.

Of course you don't have to be either analyst or analysand to be touched by psychoanalytic thinking - evident in a great variety of initiatives in psychoanalytic studies and the interest shown by many in the activities of this Institute - those whom we tend to call friends of the Institute.  This is not to say that those who debate psychoanalysis are enemies, for without challenge and debate we would surely wither.

Adam Phillips suggests, with more than whimsy, that much of the most interesting psychoanalysis is written in fact by people outside of the profession and wonders (slightly tongue in cheek) just how much psychoanalysis in fact has been wasted on psychoanalysts!

As Ian and Reg have illustrated, Freud and psychoanalysis stimulated intellectual interest in Australian well before clinical practice commenced.  Freud, Jung, and Havelock Ellis almost shared the stage at a 1911 Congress in Sydney - well before this Institute was born.

With social change, a wider and more critical interest in psychoanalysis has continued on from Roy Winn's anchoring of the Institute in 1949.  The tension between practice, its wider application in debates with other interests and disciplines, has generated much that has been fertile and much that has been fraught.

It needs to be said that our Institute is no stranger to struggle.  We have had our own wars.  In its short life it has lost important members through illness, death and misadventure.  Its struggle to survive has at times rested on the shoulders of a very few - many of  whom, I am delighted, are here this evening, some sadly are not (particularly: Ron Brooks, Roy Martin, Ian Waterhouse, David Buick, Alan Bull, Winifred Childs and latterly M.T.H., Ron Speilman, Shahid, and Craig Powell).

Our fledgling Institute was stimulated by what Ricardo Steiner has described as the "psychoanalytic diaspora" - a dispersion of analysts fleeing persecution and hardship.  In more recent times a different sort of "dispersion" of visiting overseas analysts, some of whom have been foolish enough to stay, has enriched and widened the Institute's vision.  I should particularly mention Neville, Joan and Maurice, whose contributions have been invaluable to this Institute and to psychoanalysis in Australia.

A small group weighed down with the impossible twin burdens of clinical practice and training, and administrative duties, inherent in fostering the development of an institute, have little time or energy to look outward.  As our critical mass has increased and with the infusion of other broad shoulders and broad minds, our capacity to reach out in scientific dialogue with others has grown.  Many members, along with their clinical practice and passion for an analytic perspective, have continued to work in other fields - where they have managed to represent an interface between this Institute and the wider community.  To paraphrase Freud "encouraging emotional ties has more often tempered than fuelled misunderstanding and it has cultivated curiosity and interest."

The separation of Sydney group functions into a Branch and Institute (one of a number of Neville's many innovations) has allowed a less conflicted space to tend the needs of training and to foster a broader scientific life.

Whilst at times our resources have been very stretched, this structure has allowed a greater freedom to focus inwards and at the same time reach out.

We are enormously grateful to those whose vision and personal commitment resulted in our wee house at Willoughby. Tom and Ron deserve the Order of the Institute (if we had one) as do Neville, Joan, Maria and others for their inspiration and generosity.

The Theoretical Lecture programme over four years, followed by other Lecture series initiatives, has been our scientific flagship, along with a flotilla of individual  and group projects such as infancy research groups, health and hospital consultation services, consultation - liason programmes, child interest groups - and initiatives towards a clinic in which to house several projects. Maria and Margaret have carried this hope - whose eventual birth we hope is not as arduous as its gestation.

Although engagement and debate are important elements in our Institute's continued fertility, it needs to be emphasised that for analysts, "life in the raw" remains the clinical moment and experience.  This is the room for whatever else we do.  As Eve Steel put it so well at our last Society Conference open day - "It is in the microcosm of the fifty-minute hour, and its profound experience, that analysts forge tools of trade that can be helpful in public discourse."

An analytic process begins with some degree of insight that our most difficult battles truly lie within.  The casualties of this inner battle are the collapse of omnipotent  belief systems and false idealizations, and their harsh protectors; that like any other form of fundamentalism, keep vulnerabilities and pain insulated from true nurture and care.

An analytic process hopefully ends, at least in its clinical form, with an emergence of freedom that allows the possibility of creative action in the service of a greater good.

Hopefully this occasion marks the end of a beginning for the Institute.  The possibility of a centenary celebration now depends on what we do to ensure growth in a climate of rapid change.

Hopefully the future in is one of evolution rather than devolution.

Dr Schonburger, a Hungarian analyst of the Diaspora, in writing to Ernest Jones in 1939 remarked in reply to Dr Winn's reply to his enquiry about emigration and the reaction of other professional groups, "that regarding the amount of neurotics in Australia, the psychoanalysts are extremely unlikely to fail to make a living."

Whilst it might be said that our society's capacity to create neurosis  - and other mental ills - continues to flourish, psychoanalysis can no longer rest on a smug certainty that it holds the truth and has the answers.  The Institute will need to advance the continued relevance of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytic way of thinking in its scientific work.  We now compete for attention with many groups whose origins often reveal early psychoanalytic roots.  If there is a parental analogy here, perhaps its that our capacity to listen and to learn needs to extend beyond the consulting room. The parent often has much to learn from the child.

We wish the Institute well for the next fifty years.

 

PROFESSOR IAN WATERHOUSE

My brief  is to say a few words about the early days of the Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis.

I have organised this under the broad headings of Conception and Growth

The Dream at Conception

The Sydney Institute for Psychoanalysis was signed into incorporation on 25 June 1951, 10 years or so after the Melbourne Institute was established.

There were 15  listed goals. Compressed into 7. They might be summarised as:

1) publishing in any language, and in any part of the world, works on the science of psychoanalysis and on sciences related to psychoanalysis -- a tall order!

2) establishing and administering funds and acquiring property to advance this cause,

3) establishing courses of training in psychoanalysis

4) awarding prizes from time to time for essays, monographs or books bearing  on psychoanalytical science

5) arranging for lectures and study circles

6) establishing a clinic for the treatment by psychoanalytic methods of persons suffering from psychoneurosis and for giving advice to parents and teachers

7) making grants for therapeutic work carried out by psychoanalysts on needy persons

Tonight we can celebrate accomplishments across the range of most  of those goals!

I think it is significant to note that, of the signatories to that memorandum of association,

 --4 were listed as medical practitioners( Dr's Graham, Southwood, Fink, and Winn) though they were psychoanalysts,

--2 were listed as psychoanalysts ( Dr Clara Geroe and Dr Andrew Peto);--  although medically qualified overseas their medical qualifications were not recognised here;

and one was listed  as married woman Mrs Winn. --note the importance  of family support!

The list included 4 residing in Sydney, 2 in Melbourne (Geroe and Graham) and one in Adelaide (Southwood). From another angle 2, Geroe  and Peto,  had come from Hungary and the British Society , and one ( Fink ) was an associate member of the Swiss society, the others were Australian born.

The conceptual seeding then came from a union of people from 3 different Australian states, who had  different professional and training backgrounds, and who had come together in the dream wish to promote psychoanalysis in Sydney.  Who would have guessed that today there would be in Sydney 30 trained analysts under the rubric of the Sydney Institute? Very few years ago the total number of analysts in the whole of Australia would  have been less!

I think a number of factors can be recognised as underlying this growth 1)-a felt need  for acquiring new  understanding of human personality and psychopathology, and perhaps especially childhood disturbance, 2) persistent effort  to achieve this on the part of  the first analysts and their analysands,  then 3) professional maturation of  the Institute under the influence of a sufficiently facilitating environment . Can I say a little more about some influences which I felt were facilitating?

On the local scene in Sydney the climate of readiness  among  psychiatrists had been significantly prepared by the work of Roy Winn.  Later Dr Peto  had succeeded in interesting various psychiatrists in psychoanalytic ideas -- especially perhaps Prof David Maddison  the Professor of Psychiatry,  psychiatrist Dr Alan Jennings, and notably too child psychiatrist Dr John Kerridge.

Among psychologists readiness was perhaps  indirectly fostered by the special  interest  in personality taken by the first Professor of Psychology at Sydney University Tasman Lovell. He had written a monograph  on Dreams and Dreaming  and lectured on this topic. Certainly in my undergraduate degree  I was to learn from him that dreams have meaning and that understanding the distinction between the manifest content  of a dream and its latent content led to the extension that symptoms too have latent meaning.

It was  important that even Professors of Psychology could find such concepts fruitful and be interested in notions like defence, condensation, displacement, repression and so on. Many Psychology students were influenced  by Lovell. One can compare that positive facilitating situation with so many other instances where in academia  (both psychiatry and  psychology) psychodynamic notions may be  anathema to the lord and master of the day.

Not all the environment was facilitating --Reg Martin  pointed out  in an article published in the Australian Psychoanalytic Society's Scientific Proceedings 1996 that Prof Osborne, a professor  of Medicine, had attacked an invited paper of  Roy W Winn's in the Medical Journal of Australia by asserting that a scientific  journal is "hardly the place for such balderdash" and the government psychiatrist Dr McGeorge made even more extreme remarks of rejection.

But the early founders of the Sydney Institute were not to be daunted -- no doubt they took some encouragement to persist  with their dream wish because of the support received from people like David Maddison and John Kerridge . Kerridge managed to appoint  an honorary Psychoanalyst at the Royal Alexandria Hospital for Children--this was Janet Nield, an educationist trained in the Melbourne Institute by Dr Clara Geroe. Janet Nield's work was to have a dominant influence which would continue later with Ron  Brookes, David Buick and Alan Bull.

This application of  psychoanalytic: approaches to child hood disturbance was also the  major focus  of the work of Ron Brookes when he moved  to work  at Arndell-- influencing many who then wanted to learn more.

 

Growth

So, arising  from the  early seeding at incorporation, the Sydney Institute can be proud of the work later done by its first training analysts.  I refer particularly  to Reg Martin, Ron Brookes and David Buick and to Janet Nield before she went to Adelaide. Others also contributed to our development ; I refer especially to Alan Bull, and for a  period to Win Childs.

It was my privilege to make a more peripheral contribution with some of the training seminars, but first call on my time in the early days came from deep involvement with the growth of Sydney's third University (Macquarie) as it literally grew from the ground up. Like Janet Nield, I had trained  in Melbourne with Dr Geroe. and the Melbourne Institute, and I found her a very nurturant mothering figure, [as elder "sibling"?], in my attempts to  continue when feasible with clinical work here  in Sydney.

Others came from overseas to lend different dimensions to our institute community

-for a period we had Dr Helmut Junkers  from Germany  and Dr David Rowlett from Seattle, -- later  Dr Craig Powell came from Toronto, and we have his continuing contribution with  a special interest in self psychology

More recently, Neville and Joan Symington arrived to make a significant impact; and still more recently Maurice Whelan  joined us.  All have  helped us to grow, but this more recent era  is not my brief.

The small group of Sydney analysts met regularly. We  matured partly through regular peer review of our work, increasing case experience and from external  input; I will briefly turn to the latter in a moment.

Until the Sydney Institute acquired  the Willoughby property the members of the Institute met in people's homes-- in Hunters Hill,  Killarney Heights, Gordon, St Ives , Pymble, Mosman, Ryde  or for a period in a restaurant in the Lane Cove area.

 

Attainment of the Sydney dream

Facilitation towards attainment of the Sydney dream came from various quarters:

- the efforts of those who became training analysts  in the Sydney Institute and of those who were their analysands  (let's note here it is the privilege of the analyst to learn much from his analysands!)

- from interstate colleagues --Melbourne and Adelaide

- from overseas mentors who  came as Visiting analysts and  helped with stimulation and supervision  --I think particularly of  Irma Pick, Eric Brenman, Sidney Klein, Dinora Pines, Edna O'Shaughnessy, and Betty Joseph with whom I had  supervision; there were many others who were also helpful to us like Lois Munroe and Isobel Menzies Lyth.   [In my own case new  learning was also facilitated  by 2 sabbaticals;  the first when I was able to make significant contact with the San Francisco Institute and the second with the British Society while attached to the Tavistock Institute. ]

- from Site Visitors  who visited  on behalf of the IPA to counsel us and help to clear log jams and jostle the Australian Society into revising its constitution and code of ethics.

I think particularly of Arnold Cooper and Joseph Sandler with whom, as President of the day of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society, I had closer association; --

but we were also aided by visits of Ed Joseph, Leo Rangell,  J.Mclaughlin,  Rafe Moses,  E Limentani, Anne Marie Sandler,

Was there no Sturm und drang?  Yes there were difficult moments at times in our growth. What else would you expect, we are but  humans?  Of course we had growing pains and theoretical and personal differences, but being united in the goal of providing acceptable training, we found ways forward.

No doubt there are still unresolved issues --  forces are let loose in group processes which we should probably confront more directly than we do.

Despite great accomplishments we must not rest on our laurels. If you like computer  analogies we must regularly update our software, ensure that our mental processors are working efficiently, --peer review is perhaps the key to this.

Perhaps this implies a commitment to lifelong learning  --well that's fun! Use the mental muscle or lose it!

We want an open door and an open mind.

While preparing this I found myself thinking of those lines you'll all know from Omar Kyam--

Myself when young did eagerly frequent,

Doctor and Saint and heard great argument

About it and about, but evermore came out

By that same door as in I went.

Well our hopes are a bit different . Yes, we want an open door on learning, and we want  frequent visits, but we also want something to occur in analysis so that people come out, metaphorically, by a slightly different door!

 

PROFESSOR REG MARTIN

As the oldest living survivor of the inaugural meeting of the Institute, and although I am an inactive member of the present Institute, it gives me great pleasure to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Sydney Institute and to pay tribute to Roy Winn for his generous gift that made the founding of the Institute possible.

The Institute has been going for a long time - long before the Australian Psychoanalytical Society was even thought of.  For many of us and the wider community, the Sydney Institute was regarded as "psychoanalysis".

I well remember the inaugural meeting of the Institute - I cannot clearly remember whether it was Roy Winn or Andrew Peto who invited me - I think it was Roy Winn for he remembered me writing papers on psychoanalysis, - long before I was an analyst.

The meeting was held in the rooms of the Royal College of Physicians in Macquarie Street.  The purpose of the meeting was to launch the Institute and to hear Dr. Peto's lecture on "War neurosis".  The meeting was very well attended.  As far as I can recall there were about sixty in the audience.  This was indeed remarkable, in those days, to attract so large an audience to hear a lecture on psychoanalysis.  But it was not simply due to the organisation that went into the event, but those attending had a genuine interest in psychoanalysis. 

Psychiatrists were well represented at the meeting.  This is not surprising as the meeting was in the college of Physicians.

Many people do not recognise that one of the reasons behind the formation of the Institute was personal.  That was that Roy had serious misgivings about the hegemony that Melbourne had about training and that he was determined to set up a training institute in Sydney for he was convinced that the training of psychoanalysis was needed in Sydney.  You will of course have noted that even fifty years ago there was an active spirit of rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne.

The second, and the more public reason, was that Andrew Peto, a distinguished training analyst of the British Society had recently taken up residence in Sydney.  Roy saw this as a great opportunity to establish training in Sydney.

He was intend on being analysed, for the second time, by Peto, for he was determined to become a training analyst and to play his part in the new Sydney Institute.  Unfortunately Peto left Sydney to take up a position in New York, much to the annoyance of Roy and the vision of training in Sydney vanished.  It was not until 1968 that training in Sydney became a reality.

For many years, the Institute worked closely with psychiatrists.  This was understandable for at that time, psychoanalysis was seen as a branch of psychiatry.  But working with psychiatrists was a necessity for the struggling Institute.  For many years the regular meetings of the Institute comprised of but three analysts, Roy Winn, Janet Nield and myself, together with two or three psychiatrists.

The psychiatrists who attended these meetings learned a great deal from psychoanalysis, so much so, that one regular attendee of these meetings used his position in the hospital to have the position of "psychoanalyst" created in that hospital.  This was the first time in Australia that such a position had been created.

After a while, with an increasing number of analysts, we tended to become inward looking and to be concerned with the development of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society and we discontinued our invitation to outsiders.  We had only analysts at our regular meetings.  I understand that the present Institute has reversed this practice and is actively concerned to make contact with other disciplines.

While I most certainly will not be at the seventy-fifth celebration of the Institute, I am sure that the Institute will remain as the flagship of psychoanalysis in this city.

Perhaps with the increasing numbers in the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, there is no telling what the future is for the Sydney Institute.

 

50^th Anniversary Attendance - List of Names

Prof. Reg Martin

Clare Norden (daughter)

 

Ian Waterhouse

Marie Waterhouse

 

Lawrence Nield

Andrea Nield

 

Murray Winn

Evelyne Winn

 

John Gleeson

 

Margaret Berkovic

 

Bill Betts

 

John Boots

Beth Boots

 

Ric Curnow

 

Ros Glickfeld

 

Don Grant

 

Ken Heyward

 

Maria Teresa Hooke

 

Elizabeth Kerr

Phillip Kerr   

 

Sue LaGanza

 

Michal Lapinski

 

Wayne Mason

Helen Mason

 

John McClean

Sue McClean

 

Brian Muir

 

Morna Nancarrow

Chris Commens

 

Col Osman

Roger Buckle

 

Celia Pickworth

Keith Shillington

 

Craig Powell

Jannie Powell

 

Bob Salo

Frances Thomson Salo

 

Peter Smith

 

Ron Spielman

Judy Spielman

 

Eve Steel

 

Neville Symington

 

Jim Telfer

 

Tom Wilmot

Stephanie Wilmot

 

Kaye Levy

David Lain

 

Laurie Lovell-Simons

 

 

Buick, Ebert, Falk, Gyler, Walters, Singer said they were not coming when I originally asked (before invitations were sent).

 

 

No replies from:  (However the SIP members listed below had indicated acceptance when originally asked)

 

Eliane Bull

Peter Ellingsen

Blakemore

Brookes

Chester

Christie

Coleman

Cushnie & David Ben Tovin

Daniel

Davis

Dunn & Ford

Fail

Garner

Gillen

Hilton & Rogers

Hook

Kvelde

Neil Martin

Helen Martin

McIntyre

Millott

Nelson & Potter

O'Brien

Orr

Safier & Nathanson

Sheehan

Southwood

Stein

Turpin

Whelan

Howard

Israelstam

Sullivan

McLean

Pataki

Dunphy Blomfield

Blake

Kirkby

McIlwaine

Gibbs

Adamson

Schimmel

Ungerer

McMahon

Dolby

Miles

Balint

David & Isla Lonie

Philips

Fletcher

Parkinson

Barnes

Thomas

Perry

Clark

Noonan

Fullerton

Tom & Mary O'Brien

Henry

Maize

Petocz

Terry

Katchan