Anxiety at a time of crisis

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 170-182

  Stonebridge, Lyndsey ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANXIETY; ARTICLE; HISTORY; HUMAN; PSYCHOANALYSIS; UNITED KINGDOM; WAR;

ANXIETY; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; PSYCHOANALYSIS; WAR;

EID: 54749147524     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1998.45.171     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. See Elizabeth Bowen's novel of love, trust and espionage, The Heat of the Day (1948)
2. and her wartime stones such as 'The Demon Lover' and 'Mysterious Kor' (The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Harmondsworth, 1983).
3. Henry's Green's Caught (1943)
4. and Back (1951)
5. speak of the lot of men on the home front, while his Loving (1945) tells of loyalty and love in Ireland.
6. See also Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude (1947)
7. for a disturbing portrait of the lives and loathings of those evacuated to the suburbs, and Inez Holden's Night-Shift (1941) for an account of a week in the lives of munitions factory workers during the Blitz.
8. Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British fiction and Poetry 1939-1945, London, 1995. The strength of Piette's argument rests with his account of the 'theatricality' of wartime culture and propaganda. My quarrel is with his definition of a 'private imagination' that is set in opposition to that culture. Without denying the reality of personal tragedy, there is more to be said here about the historical construction of 'privacy', most obviously in terms of class. Although probably equally class-blind a psychoanalytical account of the 'imagination at war', by contrast, would want to emphasise the extent to which the unconscious and fantasy rough the edges of the distinction between private and public so that both are called into question.
9. Macdonald's account of this patient and of the manifest and latent content of Mass Observers' anxiety dreams can be found in his hand-written report to Tom Harrisson dated September 1939, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, M-OA: TC - DREAMS Box 1/D. Harrisson had persuaded the Ministry of Information to commission Mass Observation to report on the state of civilian morale. At that time, R. A. Macdonald is listed as a guest member of the British Psycho-Analytic Society (and as the Society's acting librarian). He became a full member in 1942. For later Mass Observation work on civilian morale, see War Begins at Home, London, 1940.
10. This description of the work of the 1938 Committee is drawn from Edward Glover's 'Notes on the Psychological Effects of War Conditions on the Civilian Population (1)', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 22, 1941, pp. 132-146.
11. See also the collection of essays by medical officers, army psychiatrists and members of the Tavistock Clinic, The Neuroses in War, ed. Emmanuel Miller, London, 1940. The collection includes extracts from the famous 'Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry on Shell-Shock' (1922) which was one of the key documents for considering the risks of a comparable outbreak of civilian shock in the coming war. As Glover points out, the Committee was mainly comprised of psychologists who had worked with the 1918 armies or with the Ministry of Pensions.
12. As a result their recommendations tended to treat the civilian population as though it were an army division 'strung out in battle-formation' (see 'Description of the Treatment Facilities for Civilian Psychoneurotic Casualties provided by the Emergency Medical Service' (1940), reprinted in Neuroses in War). In the event, the Ministry of Health proposed its own plan. Glover notes 'Reverting to the ideologies of the last war but one, the Minister decided [...] to put the organization of the emergency mental services in the hands of a neurologist assisted by a psychiatrist. And that was the end of a sorry story, which threatened to set back the development of clinical psychology by twenty years and did in fact shut the door on any prospect of systematic research on the psychology of a people at war.' (p. 133).
13. Edward Glover, 'Notes on the Psychological Effects of War Conditions on the Civilian Population (1)', p. 133.
14. Other analysts in this group included Marjorie Brierley, W. R. D. Fairbairn (who reported from Scotland), Kate Friedlander (who came to London from Vienna in 1933 with Paula Heimann), Willi Hoffer (who fled to London in 1938 with Sigmund and Anna Freud), Karin Stephen (a long-standing member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and sister-in-law to Virginia Woolf) and William Gillespie (who joined the Emergency Medical Service and worked in the re-located Maudsley Hospital at Mill Hill). What's interesting about this group formation is the extent to which it brings together analysts from different strands of psychoanalytic thought current in the British Psycho-Analytic Society. Far from being a homogenous and companionable group the Society was bitterly divided in the 1940s. Melanie Klein arrived in Britain, at Ernest Jones's invitation, in 1926 and quickly established a reputation and a following. Edward Glover and Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg had begun to oppose her work in the mid-1930s. With the arrival of the Freuds and other exiles in 1938 the Society began to fracture. These tensions culminated in the intensely acrimonious Controversial Discussions held during the war (see note 25, below). At the same time as this group of analytic observers were sharing their work, the British Society was engaged in a bitter power-struggle about the running of the Society (partly prompted by the outbreak of war).
15. Edward Glover, 'Notes on the Psychological Effects of War Conditions on the Civilian Population, (III. The 'Blitz' - 1940-1), International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 23, 1942, pp. 29-30 and pp. 36-37.
16. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, New York, 1947.
17. Bernstein's 'The Age of Anxiety' was premiered in New York in 1949.
18. This article is a preliminary working through of issues which are central to a larger work-in-progress, 'The Age of Anxiety': Psychoanalysis and Culture, that considers the writing of anxiety in psychoanalysis, literature, social policy and philosophy in the early 1940s.
19. Mark Seltzer, 'Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere', October 80, Spring 1997, p. 4.
20. The classic account of memory and shell-shock in World War One is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, London, 1975.
21. See also, Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land Combat and Identity in World War I, Cambridge, 1979,
22. Elaine Showalter's chapter on 'Male Hysteria' in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1990, London, 1985
23. and Ruth Leys's excellent 'Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet and the Question of Memory', Critical Inquiry no. 4, vol. 20, Summer 1994.
24. For a brilliant reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle
25. and Eliot's The Waste Land
26. see Maud Ellman, 'The Waste Land: A Sphinx without a Secret', in The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Brighton, 1987.
27. Recent work on trauma, memory and history is extensive. See Cathy Caruth, 'Introduction', American Imago special issue 'Psychoanalysis, Culture, Trauma', 48, Winter 1991,
28. and 'Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History', Yale French Studies 79, 1991;
29. and Ian Hacking, 'Two Souls in One Body', Critical Inquiry 17, Summer 1991.
30. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926 [1925]),
31. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE) 20, p. 166.
32. Theodor Reik, 'Aggression from Anxiety' (1937), International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 22, 1941, p. 8.
33. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, p. 165.
34. Edward Glover, The Psychology of Fear and Courage, Harmondsworth, 1940, pp. 21-22.
35. Henry Green, Caught, London, 1943.
36. See, for example, Freud's 'Draft E. "How Anxiety Originates"' (1894), The Origins of Psychoanalysis, London and New York, 1954, and On the Grounds for detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis"' (1895), SE 3.
37. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, p. 138.
38. Samuel Weber, 'The Witch's Letter', Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge, 1991, p. 152.
39. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, p. 138.
40. As James Strachey points out in his editor's introduction to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud's final theory of anxiety corresponds particularly with his new work on female sexuality.
41. 'The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex', for example was published in 1924
42. and 'Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes' in 1925, that is, the same year in which Freud was writing Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.
43. Both essays can be found in SE 19. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety itself Freud returns to the case of 'Little Hans' (the first child analysis in psychoanalytic history), and rehearses his new theories of female sexuality (little girls have castration complexes but they can't, logically, have castration anxiety as they've nothing to lose: they do, however, suffer from separation anxiety).
44. See Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, pp. 129-130.
45. See also Freud's 'Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses', SE 17.
46. Denise Riley, The War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, London, 1983.
47. The 'Controversial Discussions' refer to the ten Scientific Meetings set up to debate and clarify the differences between Kleinian psychoanalysis and Freudian psychoanalysis (1943-1944), although in fact debate began earlier in 1942 in a series of Extraordinary Business Meetings called in response to anxieties about both Klein's influence and the running of the Society. These discussions are now published in full in Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner (eds), The Freud-Klein Controversies: 1941-1945, New Library of Psychoanalysis, vol. 11, London, 1991.
48. For accounts of the controversies see Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Work, London,
49. Teresa Brennan, 'Controversial Discussions and Feminist Debate'
50. and Pearl King, 'Early Divergences between the Psycho-Analytic Societies in London and Vienna', both in Freud in Exile, Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes, eds Edward Timms and Naomi Segal, New Haven, 1988
51. and Jacqueline Rose, 'Negativity in Melanie Klein' and 'War in the Nursery' in Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein, Oxford, 1993.
52. Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), London, 1989.
53. discuss Klein's reading of anxiety in more depth in 'Anxiety in Klein: The Missing Witch's Letter', in Reading Melanie Klein, eds John Phillips and Lyndsey Stonebridge, London, forthcoming.
54. Melanie Klein notes (KLE/P.33). These are in the Melanie Klein Archives held in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine and reproduced here by the kind permission of the Melanie Klein Trust.
55. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (first translation 1937), London, 1966, p. 70.
56. The nurseries were funded by the Foster Parents' Plan for War Children, Inc., New York. Anna Freud's and Dorothy Burlingham's fascinating and scrupulously detailed monthly reports to the charity can be found in Infants without Families and Reports on the Hampstead War Nurseries 1939-1945, London, 1974.
57. For an account of this work see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography, London, 1988.
58. Klein returned to London in 1941. Her full-length retrospective account of Richard's analysis is the longest case history published in psychoanalysis. See Narrative of a Child Analysis: The Conduct of the Psycho-Analysis of Children seen in the Treatment of a Ten-year-old Boy (1961), London, 1975.
59. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, Infants without Families, p. 27.
60. Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, Infants without Families, p. 166.
61. Joan Riviere letter to Melanie Klein dated June 3 1940, in the Melanie Klein Archives (PP/KLE/C.96).
62. Melanie Klein, 'What does death represent to the individual?', in the Melanie Klein Archives (PP/KLE/C.95), p. 2.
63. See Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, London, 1950, p. 22,
64. and Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz, London, 1976, pp. 17-28 and pp. 38-40.
65. Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz, p. 39 and p. 77.