'A nice type of the English scientist': Tansley and Freud

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 64-100

  Cameron, Laura ^a   Forrester, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 55949088902     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1999.48.64     Document Type: Article

References (122)

1. Sir Harry Godwin, 'Sir Arthur Tansley: The Man and the Subject, The Tansley Lecture, 1976', Journal of Ecology 65, 1977, p. 13: 'Tansley undertook a more or less routine clerking post in one of the Ministries, where his powers were barely called upon'.
2. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas, introduction by Riccardo Steiner, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1993 (hereafter abbreviated to FJ), Freud to Jones, 6 April 1922, p. 468
3. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 volumes), edited by James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1953-74 (hereafter abbreviated to SE), vol. 11, p. 33.
4. Three Contributions by Sir Arthur Tansley, F. R. S., Sigmund Freud Archives, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA (hereafter abbreviated to LoC), Interview with Kurt Eissler, summer 1953, p. 9. Quoting these words does not mean we endorse their accuracy - such is always the case, but particularly so when it comes to verdicts on a historical actor's inner mental states.
5. Harry Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley 1871-1955', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of The Royal Society 3, November 1957, pp. 227-46, this from p. 232.
6. Robert McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 69.
7. 'The Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching', The New Phytologist 16: 10, Dec. 1917, pp. 241-52. Psychological language infuses the piece.
8. F. E. Bower, 'Botanical Bolshevism', The New Phytologist 17: 5, 6, May/June 1918, pp. 105-7;
9. A. D. Boney, 'The "Tansley Manifesto" affair', The New Phytologist 118: 1, May 1991, pp. 3-21.
10. Letter dated 18 Dec. 1918, Frederic Clements Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie, cited in Frank Golley, A History of the Ecosytem Concept in Ecology, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993, p. 208.
11. FJ, Freud to Jones, 10 March 1910, p. 48.
12. FJ, Jones to Freud, 30 March 1910, p. 49.
13. William Cooper, 'Sir Arthur Tansley and the Science of Ecology', Ecology 38: 4, October, 1957, pp. 658-9,
14. quoting a letter from Tansley dated Nov. 1923. The book was widely reviewed, and favourably by such luminaries as Havelock Ellis in the Daily Herald, 22 December 1920.
15. A. G. Tansley, The New Psychology in its Relation to Life, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1920, p. 6.
16. Tansley, 'The impact of Freud's work and personality on a non-medical biologist', LoC, p. 2. Tansley's scrapbook of reviews and correspondence regarding The New Psychology is held in the A. G. Tansley Collection, Library, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge (henceforth Tansley Archive).
17. See Ruth Hall, Marie Stopes: a biography, Deutsch, London, 1977,
18. and Ruth Hall (ed.), Dear Dr Stopes: Sex in the 1920s, Deutsch, London, 1978.
19. Tansley, The impact of Freud's work. . .' LoC p. 2.
20. Jones mentioned to Freud that Tansley had approached him in a letter dated 6 May 1921 and Freud responded 19 May informing Jones that he had received Tansley's letter (see FJ, p. 424).
21. See FJ, Jones to Freud, 6 May 1921, p. 421, and Rundbrief by Jones, 19 Oct. 1920, Otto Rank Archives, Columbia University, New York, USA. We thank Ernst Falzeder for valuable assistance with unpublished Freud correspondence and the Rundbriefe.
22. Kardiner Oral History Interviews, interviews conducted by Bluma Swerdloff, 1963, Columbia University Oral History Project, New York, p. 102.
23. Freud to Anna Freud, 19 March 1922, Anna Freud Archives, Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA.
24. Siegfried Bernfeld, 'Sigmund Freud, M.D., 1882-1885', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 32, 1951, p. 216.
25. FJ, Jones to Freud, 1 April 1922, p. 467.
26. Including Elements of Plant Biology in 1922 (based on the lecture course he gave to first-year medical students), Practical Plant Ecology in 1923, and a co-edited volume Aims and Methods in the study of Vegetation in 1926. See Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley', p. 232.
27. Wicken Fen, purchased in 1899 by the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty, is the oldest of Britain's nature reserves. See Laura Cameron, 'Histories of Disturbance', Radical History Review 74, 1999, pp. 4-24 for possible connections between Tansley's ecology and psychology in this place/period.
28. Letter from Clements to Tansley, 12 Jan. 1923, Tansley Papers, Dept of Plant Sciences, Cambridge, cited in Golley, History of the Ecosystem, p. 209.
29. Letter from Tansley to Clements, 8 March 1923, Frederic Clements Collection, University of Wyoming, cited in Golley, History of the Ecosystem, p. 209.
30. Letter from Tansley to Clements, 30 May 1923, Clements Collection, University of Wyoming: cited in Golley, History of the Ecosystem, p. 209.
31. Freud to Abraham, 14 March 1924, Sigmund Freud Archives, Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA.
32. Ernest Jones, 'Review, New Psychology', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 1, 1920, p. 480.
33. Rundbrief written by Jones, 19 Oct. 1920, Otto Rank Archives.
34. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE vol. 7, p. 131.
35. FJ, Jones to Freud, [?] Oct. 1922, p. 501.
36. Tansley, 'Review, C. J. Patten, The Memory Factor in Biology', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 8, 1927, p. 292.
37. A. G. Tansley, 'Critical notice of Versuch einer Genitaltheorie by Dr. S. Ferenczi', British Journal of Medical Psychology 4, 1924, pp. 156-61.
38. Archives of British Psycho-Analytical Society, FAA/134 Committee Minutes.
39. 'Autobiographical Introduction', probably delivered to Magdalen Philosophy Club, 5 May 1932, Tansley Archive, Dept of Plant Sciences, Cambridge.
40. Archives of British Psycho-Analytical Society, FAA/161 Committee Minutes.
41. Jones to Abraham, 12 Nov. 1924, Sigmund Freud Archives, LoC, Washington DC, USA.
42. Tansley was eventually elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, but only in 1944, well after his retirement from the Chair at Oxford.
43. J. R. [John Rickman], 'Susan Sutherland Isaacs, C. B. E., M. A., D. Sc. (Vict.), Hon. D. Sc. (Adelaide)', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 31, 1950, p. 270. Susan Isaacs would 'read some notes upon Child Life' at a meeting hosted by Tansley at his Granchester home 13 or 14 June 1925;
44. see Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick, Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-1925, Chatto and Windus, London, 1986, p. 281.
45. See Cameron and Forrester, 'Tansley's Network', forthcoming.
46. A. G. Tansley, 'Freudian Psycho-Analysis', The Nation and The Athenæum, 12 Sept. 1925, p. 700.
47. In addition to pioneering Quaternary research in Britain with his wife, Margaret (who took up pollen analysis at Tansley's suggestion), Godwin (1901-1985, F. R. S. 1945) was, like Tansley, a leader in the Nature Conservancy. See R. G. West, 'Harry Godwin', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 34, 1988, pp. 261-92.
48. Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley', p. 236.
49. Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley', p. 236.
50. The source for Needham's reminiscence is a personal communication from Edward Timms (to Cameron, 17 March 1997), who asked Needham about interest in Freud in Cambridge in the 1920s. Charles Raven, botanist, distinguished historian of natural history and biographer of John Ray, probably had the same teacher in mind when he noted that in the early years of this century ecology and psychology were being drawn together - a comment which, without Tansley, would be somewhat mysterious. In a speech to the Cambridge Natural History Society in 1957, Charles Raven said at the beginning of the century, the tide had begun slowly but surely to turn and though the gulf betwen the men of museums and the men of the open-air was still wide, the liveliest minds in biology were already moving towards a denial of the antithesis, towards ecological and psychological problems and to that sense of wholeness which is now influencing every department from medicine to nuclear physics. Cited in F. W. Dillistone, Charles Raven: Naturalist, Historian, Theologian, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1975, pp. 174-5.
51. The Nation and Athenaeum, 1928: Brittain's letter, 28 July, p. 552; Tansley's first response (from Kielce in Poland), 11 August, p. 618; Brittain's next, 18 August, pp. 644-5; and Tansley's long and final rejoinder (from Saas Fee in Switzerland), 15 Sept., p. 757.
52. Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley', p. 238.
53. Cameron, 'A. G. Tansley and the Place of Anthropogenic Nature,' forthcoming 1999.
54. See John Forrester and Laura Cameron, '"Cure With A Defect": A Previously Unpublished Letter by Freud Concerning "Anna O."', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, forthcoming.
55. For instance, he gave a confidential opinion on a Prize Essay submission on 'The sense of injustice and its relation to oral sadism' in a letter to Sylvia Payne, 18 June 1941, Archives of British Psycho-Analytical Society, G06/BA/F04/03.
56. A. G. Tansley, 'Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)', Obituary Notices of Fellows of The Royal Society 3, 1939-1941, pp. 247-75.
57. He published The Values of Science to Humanity, 1942;
58. Our Heritage of Wild Nature, 1945;
59. Plant Ecology and the School (with E. Price Evans) 1946;
60. Introduction to Plant Ecology, 1946;
61. Britain's Green Mantle, 1949;
62. and Oaks and Oakwoods, 1952.
63. A. G. Tansley, 'The psychological connexion of two basic principlies of the S. F. S.', Society for Freedom in Science, Occasional Pamphlet 12, March 1952.
64. The figure (seventeen ecologists out of sixty-one members) comes from Stephen Bocking, Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1997, p. 27.
65. F. R. Winton was also an early Associate Member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, elected in the same year as the Stracheys, 1923, and remaining a member until his death in 1985. He was a physiologist who spent most of his working life at University College, London, apart from 1927-37 when he was in Cambridge.
66. The Drei Abhandlungen were known in translation as either Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory in Brill's translation of 1910 or from later editions on as Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1916, 1918, 1930, 1938). The first English edition to use the title Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was that of James Strachey in 1949. Volume 7 of the Standard Edition, in which the Three Essays appeared, was published in 1953.
67. The typescript has 'hero' here and in the next parenthetic phrase: apparently a typing error, either Tansley's or introduced by Tansley's assistant (if he had one) or by the Sigmund Freud Archives. The third possibility seems more probable as the typescript is in Pica 10 pt, unlike Tansley's first document, which is Courier 12 pt. On the cover sheet for THE DREAM, a stamp specifies: THE SIGMUND FREUD ARCHIVES/ Recollections/Sir Arthur Tansley's/self-interpretation of a dream./#832 (Copy)'. Given the date, the word 'copy' probably refers to a typing-out, rather than to a photostat or other mechanical copying process.
68. In choosing this expository structure, Tansley used a method similar to Freud's own, as first set out in the analysis of his 'specimen dream', the 'dream of Irma's injection' - Preamble, Dream, Analysis. Whereas Freud fuses the associations and their interpretation, Tansley separates them, and inverts the order of Preamble and Dream.
69. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE vol. 5, p. 621.
70. Another epiphanic bike-ride to Grantchester was made by Bertrand Russell in the spring of 1902, when 'suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realised that I no longer loved Alys': Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1963, pp. 147-8;
71. also commentary in Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell. The Spirit of Solitude, Jonathan Cape, London, 1996, p. 145.
72. Russell was, during their undergraduate years together at Trinity, as Tansley put it (writing in the third person): 'the most penetrating mind with which he came into contact, and who was his favourite companion in midnight talks' (Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley', p. 229). Russell's autobiography was published only after Tansley's death and we have no evidence if Russell - in Cambridge for most of the time till his dismissal by Trinity in 1916 - and Tansley talked intimately at this time. There is a faint possibility that either Tansley or Russell used each other's recounted story of an epiphanic bicycle ride for his own purposes.
73. Godwin, 'Arthur George Tansley', p. 243;
74. see Tansley, 'Sigmund Freud: Obituary Notices'.
75. Eissler Interview, LoC, p. 4.
76. Tansley, 'The impact of Freud's work. . .', LoC, pp. 4-5.
77. Eissler Interview, LoC, p. 3.
78. Eissler Interview, LoC, p. 7.
79. Godwin, 'Sir Arthur Tansley', p. 25.
80. Copy in Freud's Library, Freud Museum, London. We thank Michael Molnar for information and assistance concerning the books held there, and also unpublished correspondences held by the Museum.
81. Copy in Library, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. Special thanks to Lydia Marinelli, Curator, for her generous assistance concerning books held by the Museum that were once owned by Tansley.
82. FJ, Freud to Jones, 16 April 1922, p. 474.
83. For examples, see his analysis of Loe Kann and of Joan Riviere, discussed in Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester, Freud's Women, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1992.
84. Inscription in Freud's copy in the Freud Museum, London.
85. Personal communication, Ian Patterson, 26 February 1999.
86. In New Psychology, p. 197, Tansley referred to another children's author to illustrate his point that 'the moral law holds for animal communities just as it does for human societies' - 'Mr. Kipling, one of our greatest modern exponents of the glories of herd life and the herd instinct, has brought this out in his delightful stories of the wolf pack and the bee-hive'.
87. He specifically recommended 'Mowgli's Brothers' in The Jungle Book (1894),
88. 'How Fear Came' in The Second Jungle Book (1895),
89. and 'The Mother Hive' in Actions and Reactions (1909).
90. Freud did not make professional use of Milne's verses, but his daughter Anna did, quoting and interpreting a passage from When We Were Very Young in her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1968 (revised edn), p. 83, concerning 'Denial in Word and Act'.
91. Tansley, 'The impact of Freud's work and personality on a non-medical biologist', LoC. In the interview, Eissler asked Tansley if Freud ever gave him a gift and he replied: 'No, he . . . Yes, he gave me a portrait, a photograph, and a copy of the Traumdeutung'. The Leonardo figures in Engelmann's photographs of Freud's study, taken in 1938: visible from his desk, as Tansley noted with evident pride, when he saw it on his 1928 visit to Freud. There is no record of the Pepys Diaries ever having been part of Freud's library, neither in the collection of books he took from Vienna to London, nor in the portion sold when Freud was forced to leave Vienna.
92. See Nolan D. C. Lewis and Carney Landis, 'Freud's Library', Psychoanalytic Review 44, 1957, pp. 327-56
93. and David Bakan's corrective 'The authenticity of the Freud Memorial Collection', Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 11, 1975, pp. 365-7.
94. The Leonardo used to hang in the Burlington, and thus off the beaten track - as Tansley recognized. Its acquisition by the National Gallery, London, was the occasion for a very public and impassioned campaign in the 1960s.
95. Freud's desire to be a Professor is analyzed in both Jones's and Gay's biographies of Freud and in the detailed studies of Joseph and Renée Gicklhorn and of K. R. Eissler. In 1924 Freud pedantically corrected Pfister on this biographical fact: 'Actually I was never a full professor of neurology and was never anything but a lecturer. I became a titular professor in 1902 and a titular full professor in 1920, have never given up my academic post, but have continued with it for thirty-two years, and finally gave up my voluntary lectures in 1918'. (Freud and Oskar Pfister, Psycho-Analysis and Faith, London, Hogarth Press, 1963, 9 June 1924, p. 95.) 'Titular' here means something between 'Associate' and 'Honorary'.
96. We thank Peder Anker, historian of ecological science, for pointing out, when we noticed Tansley's absence from the IPA Oxford Congress, that he was probably attending the 1929 South African BAAS meeting (July 22-August 3).
97. Undated entry in notebook entitled 'Psychology' which contains notes for 1929-36, Tansley Archive, Cambridge.
98. A. G. Tansley, 'The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms', Ecology 16: 3, July 1935, p. 285.
99. Tansley argued that Phillips simply trotted out F. E. Clements's theory that vegetation constituted a 'complex organism' which could be studied in the manner that physiologists approached the individual organism. Although Tansley had initially adhered to this idea, he increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with Clements's organismal analogy as well as his 'monoclimax' - the theory that there was a single end point to vegetational succession in a given climatic area. In his 1935 paper, Tansley wrote that Phillips's three linked articles in Tansley's Journal of Ecology (John Phillips, 'Succession, development, the climax and the complex organism: an analysis of concepts, I', Journal of Ecology 22, 1934, pp. 554-71
100. and '[Parts II, III]', 1935, Journal of Ecology 23, 1935, pp. 210-46, pp. 488-508) invited 'attack at almost every point'.
101. William Cooper, 'Sir Arthur Tansley and the Science of Ecology', Ecology 38: 4, Oct. 1957, p. 659, citing letter dated Nov. 1923.
102. 'Notes on the conducting tissue-system in Bryophyta', Annals of Botany 15, 1901, p. 1
103. and 'On the structure of Schizaea malaccana', Annals of Botany 17, 1903, p. 493.
104. Edith also created the index for Types of British Vegetation, Cambridge University Press, 1911, for which Arthur thanked her in the Preface.
105. Meisel and Kendrick, Bloomsbury/Freud, p. 216, letter dated 23 Feb. 1925. According to his grand-daughter, Dr Anna Dickens, Tansley's daughters 'were well known for being attractive both in appearance and intellect'.
106. Personal communication, Dr Anna Dickens, Cambridge, 23 June 1999. Given the insufficient evidence as to the identity of Tansley's 'beloved', it is not appropriate to give extensive information concerning those whom we regard privately as candidates. If a cache of papers belonging to any of those candidates emerged and illumined further aspects of this study, this might well change our view of what is appropriate to publish. Permission to publish from the close relatives or estate of the person would still be needed.
107. Tansley, New Psychology, p. 223.
108. D. Bryan, 'Reports. British Psycho-Analytical Society', Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, in International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 7, 1926, p. 533.
109. Bryan, 'Reports', pp. 533-4.
110. Freud, 'A special type of object-choice made by men', SE vol. 11, pp. 165-75.
111. Tansley, New Psychology, pp. 236-7.
112. A. G. Tansley, Practical Plant Ecology, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1923, p. 48.
113. For more detailed analysis, see Cameron, 'Histories of Disturbance', Radical History Review 44, 1999, pp. 4-24
114. and Cameron, 'A. G. Tansley and the Place of Anthropogenic Nature' (forthcoming).
115. Tansley, New Psychology, p. 130.
116. Library of Congress Interview, Kurt Eissler, p. 12.
117. A number of passages in New Psychology single out a married man who conducts 'a serious illicit love-affair' (p. 103) as peculiarly subject to intense conflict; see also p. 111.
118. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), London, Penguin, 1992, p. 100.
119. Information received from Dr Richard West, Godwin's colleague and executor, who donated much of Godwin's estate, including Tansley's papers, to the Department of Plant Sciences, Cambridge, and informed us (14 May 1999) that it was Godwin who donated the books to the Freud Museum in Vienna. Tansley's will was probated 14 April 1956.
120. Ms letter, undated but clearly after 1972, addressed to members of the international psychoanalytic movement, Anna Freud Archives, Library of Congress, Washington DC.
121. Dr Peter Grubb of the Department of Plant Sciences in Cambridge has a small private collection of Tansley's botanical works, received from Sir Harry Godwin. Tansley's own edition of Freud's works in English, prepared by his long-standing friend James Strachey, found its way into a secondhand bookshop in Cambridge in the 1970s, where it was eagerly acquired by Edward Timms, now Professor of German at the University of Sussex and a distinguished commentator on psychoanalysis. He retained the original invoices that came with the set, from which the following information is derived: Tansley subscribed to the Standard Edition on 2 April 1953, ordering it through the London bookseller I. R. Maxwell of 4-5 Fitzroy Square. Before his death in 1955, Tansley certainly received two other volumes (Vol. 13, 1953, and Vol. 18, 1955, dispatched to him in May 1955). The final volume must have been delivered to Tansley's estate in 1974.
122. In a chance conversation with Lydia Marinelli, Archivist of the Freud Museum in Vienna, JF discovered the presence of Tansley's books on the bookshelves beside which he was sitting. As professional librarians and experts on the history of psychoanalysis, the Freud Museum staff had excellent records of the source of the books, but no knowledge of the identity of Sir Arthur Tansley, F. R. S.