Harry Southwood

Harry Southwood

Interviewed by

WENDY BRUMLEY

(Reprinted here with kind permission from “The Australian Journal of Psychotherapy” Volume13, Numbers 1 & 2. 1994.)

This is the transcript of an interview conducted by Dr Wendy Brumley with Harry Southwood on 12th. June 1994. Dr Southwood was the first psychoanalyst to practise in Adelaide.

Harry Southwood was born at Kadina, South Australia, on 30th December 1907. After five years at East Adelaide School, he attended Prince Alfred College from 1920 until 1925. He began medical training at Adelaide University in 1926 and qualified M.B.B.S. in 1932. He was RMO at the Adelaide Hospital from February until November 1933. He then entered private practice. He obtained the B.Sc. in 1936 and M.D. in 1943. He became a Member of the R.A.C.P. a year earlier.

He became an associate member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1953 and a full member in 1958. He was one of the original members of the Australasian Association of Psychiatrists which eventually became the R.A.N.Z.C.P. He retired from practice at the end of 1991 and lives with his wife in the Adelaide suburb of Royston Park.

WB: If we could start with when you decided to do psychoanalysis — what motivated you?

IIS: I'd always had a general interest in psychoanalysis, even as a schoolboy. I'd read about Freud, but I wasn't determined to become a psychoanalyst, I was just interested as I might have been interested in Napoleon. Things were decided early. My family thought I ought to be a doctor like my brother, and I fell in with the idea. In 1932 1 qualified, and I went into general practice a year afterwards, and this was in the depths of the depression and there was very little business for a general practitioner where I was in a very poor part of Adelaide, so I had plenty of spare time. I spent this spare time studying for a B.Sc. They had a sort of a cross between a B.A. and a mixture of physiology and psychology. Being qualified medically, I didn't need to do much physiology or chemistry; it was part of the course I'd already done. I got credit for that, and I only had to study psychology. Part of that study was under McKellar Stewart who was the professor of philosophy, and he was interested in psychoanalysis in a general way. This was way back in 1934 or 1935. At that time, I found out that the university library had all the issues of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis — right back from 1914, I think it might have started. So, I used to spend my spare time (my general practice only kept me busy about an hour a day, so I had every afternoon free pretty well) — so I used to go down to the library. I wouldn't say I read all the journals from 1914, that would be ridiculous, but I looked through them all, and I got a general idea of what was going on, what people were talking about right through the years.

Then I read a bit of a fellow called T.A. Ross. He wrote a book on psychotherapy way back in the 1930s, on what you might call commonsense psychotherapy, so I practised that as best I could with whatever patients were around. There were plenty of people with all sorts of complaints from funny feelings and faint feelings and all the rest of it. That became a bit of a hobby. Then around about 1936, Roy Winn, (he was Australia's first psychoanalyst) wrote an article for the Australian Medical Journal on psychoanalysis, which is still available. When the copyright ran out (fifty years isn't it?), I remember writing to the editor of the Journal and asking had the copyright run out and would it be quite proper for me to copy this article for the local analysts or the Australian analysts. He said yes it was outside the copyright, and it was quite okay, so I copied it. When I read this article from Roy Winn it made me interested particularly in analysis. Of course, at this time I had no idea of practising analysis, I was only practising psychotherapy, which just meant talking to people and trying to understand what their troubles were and offering them some commonsense then. If they became well, they were sent home of course. This two month could be extended up to six months. This was at Enfield Receiving House. It was run in a very individual way by an old man known as Daddy Rogers. He wasn't a psychiatrist; there weren't any psychiatrists at all in those days. I don't think anyone in Australia called himself a psychiatrist in the 1930s. The only man who practised this work in Adelaide, called himself a specialist in "nervous and mental diseases" that was the term he used. I think old Dr Maudsley used to have the same label, the same qualification. Daddy Rogers was not one of those. He was a fine old fellow; he was a traditional physician of the old British School. He lectured in the legal aspects of medicine and perhaps medical ethics too, I've forgotten. He ran the Receiving House, but in a very custodial way. He was kind and gentle. There were no treatments to give to people anyway except Paraldehyde. There was another sedative we used to give people at night, something tasting nicer than Paraldehyde. I've forgotten the name of it. Aside from that there were no treatments except general care and looking after people, and either sending them home or sending them to Parkside Mental Hospital. Dr Rogers went on well past the legal retiring age. I think in those days you were compelled to retire when you were sixty-five, but in some way he was able to hoodwink the government, or they looked the other way, and they let him go on. Eventually somebody else took over the running of the show and he was told he had to retire. He was very grieved about it. Anyway he did have to retire and a solutions for their problems. Not in any aggressive way, because I didn't know the answers anyway. 

Then about 1939 a vacancy came up at the Receiving House. Receiving Houses doesn’t exist anymore, I think. At that time we had the Mental Defectives Act, which allowed for people to be certified 'apparently mentally defective", which term covered everything. It didn't mean just people with brain defects, it covered psychoses and any sort of behaviour which meant they apparently weren't normal mentally. They could be committed to the Receiving House for a period of two months where they could be, as far as the law went, confined and looked after, and if they were established as "mentally defective", they could be further certified as definitely insane and sent to a mental hospital — lunatic asylum, I think they called it vacancy became available for a part-time employee at the Receiving House and I applied for it and got it. I wasn't in charge; I did the work but I was the Deputy Superintendent. The full Superintendent used to come out once a week and supervise me and see what I was doing.

WB: You had to live there?

HS: No. Well, I would have had to live there except there was no residence. That became a point later on. I used to go there each morning for three hours. That was fine. I went there for about nine months, then they decided to make the appointment full-time. I would have had to live there definitely, except again there was no residence for me to live in. So I became full-time then, and again I had plenty of spare time. There were officially thirty-five beds for each sex: seventy people altogether. Occasionally a few more, but mostly it was kept at that level. If we became overcrowded, we certified people and sent them on to Parkside or Northfield, the other mental hospital. Having the spare time, I had plenty of time to read and I kept on studying psychotherapy and I got quite enough of a supply of neurotic people, or mildly psychotic people, who provided me study material. People I could get to come up to my office where I could talk to them and invite them to tell me the history of their troubles. It was a very good way of learning psychiatry as far as I was concerned, because I spent hours with them, paranoids and schizophrenics. I got to sort them out. This is a very long introduction to Clara Geroe.

WB: It's interesting to know how it developed.

HS: Well this is the way it developed. There were quite a number of melancholiacs in the Receiving House in those days, because there was no treatment for melancholia then except care and attention. In due course a lot of them got better, but somewhere in that time, I've forgotten the precise year — it was somewhere around 1939—40 — Cardiazol came out. With much fear and trembling I was permitted to give some Cardiazol to these people. Have you ever seen Cardiazol given? Well, you've seen ECT, I take it. It was more dramatic than ECT — just as dramatic, anyway, and it was all new to everyone: the staff and the doctors and everyone. We injected this apparently innocuous clear fluid into the patient's vein and then after a few seconds, ten or thirty seconds, they had an epileptic fit, which was frightening to all concerned. As far as the patient was concerned it wasn't painful. If they did struggle before they had the injection, it wasn't because they knew they were going to have a fit, it was only because they didn't know what was going to happen to them and you couldn't always explain it to them. This produced a dramatic effect, even the most sceptical of the staff who thought this was another vicious and cruel medical practice upon the poor suffering people — they were converted. The whole atmosphere of the place changed within three or four months. Instead of people just sitting around and having to be dressed and fed and taken to the toilet, they got up themselves and got dressed and powdered their noses. One of the nurses was interested in occupational therapy and they opened a workshop for the women to knit and sew and embroider and various other things. The men started to play bowls. It was a miracle. Anyone who saw it and talked about the horrors of shock therapy, didn't live through it, because anyone who had experienced it like I had was utterly convinced of its value. Anyway, the relevance of this was that in 1944 1'd completed my five years as a fulltime employee. (Although I was full-time, because of the war I was allowed to do a little private practice on the side. I used to live in   coy ‘d be at Enfield all day, and then I had evening consulting, about one or two hours consulting every night) 

known to Clara and she introduced me to Paul Dane. I told her my financial position, and that I needed to find some part-time work if I was going to stop in Melbourne, and Paul Dane gave me some work. He, besides being a self-taught psychiatrist (as far as I remember), worked for the government as an assessor of people who were getting the invalid pension. From time to time the department would instruct or invite him, to go and examine certain of these people and see whether they still qualified for the pension. He was able to assign some of this to me, so that became a source of money myself. Then there was Reg Ellery. I introduced myself to him. I think he was interested in analysis too in a vague sort of way. He gave me a job administering his ECT. I should have told you that by then I'd achieved minor fame by inventing an ECT machine. It wasn't much of an invention. By this time it was already known that the voltage used wasn't terribly specific — somewhere between 90 volts and 150 volts or thereabouts — and there was some sort of timing device, and that's all you had to control it. Hughie Birch was my senior in Adelaide. He made a machine himself, a very complicated great thing about a cubic foot in size; it was an enormous weight. It had a transformer to reduce the voltage, and some sort of rheostat to control the voltage that went to the patient. He had a timing device, which was very cunning. He used the rotating telephone dial: a tenth of a second between each spot; and so if you dialled it around to nine then the current would run for nine-tenths of a second. If you dialled three, it would be three-tenths of a second. So you connected the patient up and just turned the dial and the patient had whatever dose you had prescribed. This was all very nice, except sometimes you made a bad guess and you had the choice then of giving a repeat dose and so on. My great invention was to couple up a gramophone motor. In those days all the gramophones worked at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, and I got some electrical friend to reduce the speed so that the rotation was once per second, sixty times per minute. I made it so that each time it rotated, for one-tenth of its time it would make electrical contact, so you just held the control button down and every tenth of a second the patient got a shock. It was convenient because you just pushed it down until the patient started to fit. Sometimes it happened after two or three impulses and sometimes after four or five. Also, I don't know if this is a delusion, I thought it prepared the muscular tissue more readily, because there were these repeated jabs before there was a final one. It seemed to me there was less likelihood of broken bones. We didn't have any broken bones in the past. Occasionally we had dislocated shoulders although the staff were trained to hold the shoulders down to prevent this. The patient didn't come to any harm. It sounds a terrible thing now. The patient had a sore shoulder for a few days, but afterwards he was all right again. My machine was my claim to fame. I sent an article to the Medical Journal, and it was printed there, so if you want to look it up you'll be able to find it. Not that it's that interesting.

 WIC: The 'Australian Medical Joumal'? 

IIS: Yes. I took my little machine to Melbourne with me. It was much smaller and lighter than what was available. I didn't have to have a great big turntable; I just had the motor and the little switch there. The original one I gave to Parkside (Glenside they call it now) They've got the machine there. One or two others were subsequently made similar to mine. I took the machine to Melbourne and demonstrated it to Reg Ellery and two or three others who were interested and so that was my mode of entry. Reg was quite happy for me to take my machine with me and electrocute his patients for him. That was the background. Clara was horrified that I seemed to be interested in electrotherapy; there seemed to be nothing more remote from psychoanalysis. I said to her that if she'd seen the change that happened at Enfield from people having fits, she wouldn't think it was a bad thing. I still don't think it is a bad thing. I had retired from all this and gone from general psychiatry into psychoanalysis just as the antidepressive drugs were invented, so I don't know anything about them. That was the background, that became my mode of living while I went off to analysis with Clara.

WB: She agreed to take you on for what, six months?

IIS: It was six months for a start and after that, well the war was on and I knew that anything could happen. In those days the whole thing was very irregular. There were no rules to follow. She was a Hungarian refugee. She became entitled to practise medicine in Melbourne legally. So, she was a registered medical practitioner. The British Psycho-Analytical Society couldn't officially appoint her as a training analyst because there was no analytic body in Australia. But somehow, she was able to form, with their approval — although it wasn't in the constitution — the 'Australian Branch of the British Psycho-Analytic Society', and she became entitled to train as a result. But of course, starting training and becoming qualified were different things — as different as a stream and the ocean — miles apart. All sorts of things had to happen before I could qualify. So, although I had six months' analysis, five times a week, there was no suggestion that I was completely trained or qualified, and of course the same applied to others. They were living in Melbourne, and they went on with their training. But there was no way of issuing qualifications. What happened to me was that after my six months' leave expired, I was able to get another month added on under one pretext or another. About September, after eight or nine months, I had to come back to Adelaide. I was under some control, I couldn't please myself what I did, I had to do what the authorities said. So, I came back to Adelaide and back to the job. What happened then, was that I used to go off to Melbourne irregularly. I might go twice one month and then once the next month and spend a few days there and have some more analysis and discuss the work I was doing. I was analysing people as best I could with whatever supervision I could get at that time. All this was way back. It wasn't until 1953 that eventually I was qualified. By this time I'd gone to numerous meetings — Frank would have told you this: that besides having analysis we used to go once a week on a Tuesday night to a seminar with Clara, and that wasn't just fifty minutes or an hour; that would be about three hours' worth. We'd talk ourselves sick — all aspects of analysis.

WB: When you came back every' month or two months, you flew back from Adelaide?

HS: I don't think we flew, I travelled by train probably. Maybe I flew sometimes. By modern standards it wouldn't pass as training at all, but after all if you go back into the history of analysis you find some of the early analysts only had analysis walking around the streets of Vienna with Freud. It only became more and more formal as time went on.

WB: Did she suggest that you do training, or did you suggest it?

HS: It wasn't training with a capital 'T'. It was the idea, "Let's get on and learn something about psychoanalysis." We were out on the frontier, at the outer boundaries of any official training. In time someone in the British Society got a bit concerned about the Australian Society. We couldn't call ourselves the 'Australian Psychoanalytic Society', because that would imply, we had some status with the international body; so, we called ourselves (I had nothing to do with this, I think it was Paul Dane or Clara) the 'Australian Society of Psychoanalysts' — another name, which meant we weren't pretending to be an official training body. But we did assume that we were a qualified branch of the British Society. But then the British Society disowned us and said it couldn't happen anymore. There was a bit of a fuss, and a protest and Clara felt that someone ought to be able to pull some strings or do something. No one did and so we lost our status. We could still call ourselves the 'Australian Society of Psychoanalysts' if we wanted to, but we didn't have any official status. Somewhere about 1953 there was some talk about what was going to happen to people like me and Frank and Rose Rothfield.

You presented it in Australia? You didn't go to Britain?

No, I just posted it. I was made an associate member of the British Society which wasn't any great big deal, but at least it meant I wasn't breaking the law in any way. It did mean that I could now call myself a psychoanalyst and an associate member of the British Society. Before or after the first Site Committee came?

its: This would be before. I've forgotten the dates. It will all be written down somewhere. Long before the Site Committees came. As far as I was concerned, I still used to go off to Melbourne and the group had grown a bit by then. I've forgotten when Frank became qualified, it must have been somewhere about the same time. Rose too. We weren't in competition; there was no prize for being the first one. We were all about the same time anyway. We used to meet at least every six months — more often sometimes — and we used to have an interstate conference. We'd go to Sydney and meet Roy Winn. Sometime or other there were some people who migrated to Sydney. Before Peto there was a woman whose name I have forgotten. She and her husband, they were both analysts; and they were both Hungarians too, I think. Or Germans. The man was registered to practise medicine, and the woman wasn't. According to Clara the woman was the better psychoanalyst. There's no way of judging that now. We used to meet in Sydney and in Melbourne. The group came to Adelaide sometimes. We'd all give papers and case reports, usually on long weekends, about four days. That went on. As far as I was concerned in 1958 1 went off to London and gave a paper to the British Society to become a full member. That was fourteen years after I had started. It was no hasty qualification.

WB: How did you feel about becoming a full member?

IIS: It was a big event. I was quite happy with the work I had done. They asked me a few nasty questions on why I did this and why I did that, and I told them all about it. They duly passed me. Whether they passed me with enthusiasm or reluctantly, I never found out. But I was duly qualified.

WB: mo did you present to; was it a group?

IIS: Yes, it was the membership committee. There must have been twenty or thirty people there. I gave the case report, and it was discussed afterwards. It was quite an event. Others did the same. Frank must have done the same and Rose and Janet Neild too, eventually. She was a few years behind. — I haven't told you much about Clara. I don't know what you want to know about her.

WB: This is the sort of thing I wanted. How long did you stay in London after you presented?

HS: Not for long. It was about my first overseas trip. My wife and I went, the children had more or less grown up and they were in the care of various relatives. We were away for eight months and I spent about three months of that in London. I didn't go to London to study psychoanalysis particularly; I thought of it as a general world tour. We went by ship in those days and that was glorious. We spent six weeks getting there and four weeks coming home — by cargo ship. It was a beautiful time. We started off going to Bunbury in Western Australian and we spent a couple of days there, we had a barbeque on the beach; then we went off to Aden and Port Said and Marseilles and up along the French coast — Dunkirk, and right up to Norway.

WB: Did you meet analysts in London that you remember?

HS: Only at the meeting of the Society. I didn't go to any other Society meetings. I could have, but I didn't get around to that. It must have been gradually after that that British analysts started to come out here on visits. Frank would know all these things. I haven't bothered to remember.

WB: Once you were qualified you established a psychoanalytic practice?

HS: I went to Melbourne at the end of 1943 and the six or eight months I spent in Melbourne was in 1944. I may be a year out.

WB: Sometimes you can remember better things that have happened quite a while ago. 

HS: Yes.

WB: That first six months you spent in Melbourne with Clara Geroe — How did you find her as an analyst? What were your personal impressions and feelings, lying there on the couch?

HS: It was an experience for me. I'd never seen a psychoanalyst before.

There were none available. I'd read about analysis, and I knew what it entailed. There was no problem lying on the couch and talking about myself; I was prepared to do that till the cows came home. That was no problem. My only concern was what she was going to say to me. As far as I was concerned, she was all that I wanted. She was prepared to listen to me and hear my points of view. It wasn't that she provided me with such extraordinary interpretations or insights, but she showed that she was interested in what I had to say, and in following my train of thought. I had no misgivings about the work that was going on. Of course, I don't think psychoanalysts understand it even now, but for me it was a dramatic experience that just depended on the fact that I was being psychoanalysed. It didn't depend on anything momentous from Clara. I remember one time — it must have been after four or five months — for some reason I felt extraordinarily angry. I felt a general fury. I didn't know what I was angry about or who I was angry with, I just had this fury inside me. I felt everyone had better leave me alone for a while. For me it was a transformation. I'd got in touch with aggressive impulses which I'd forgotten about until then. It came as just a general uncovering, a general process. If you keep on talking long enough, something's bound to come out, and that's the way it was. It wasn't that some insightful interpretation had made me realise something.

WB: Did you find that very creative, or energising?

IIS: It was not so much creative as critical, a turning point, it changed my whole character really. Other people noticed it more than I did. When I came back from Melbourne all my colleagues thought I'd changed. I couldn't understand it. They didn't understand it either. They said, "Oh, you're different." I think my aggression used previously to come out in smartness and sarcasm.

WB: So, it was focused more?

HS: I think I'd lost it. I didn't need to defend myself against people by being nasty. I felt much happier in myself generally speaking. I think everyone else was much happier to live with me too.

WB: When you came back to Adelaide then, what sort of work did you start?

HS: I still had to go to the Receiving House. This went on for about another four years, but then in 1948 or 1949 they said to me that this business of my having a private practice and being at Enfield too, had to stop. I had to give up my private practice. I said I couldn't afford to do that. They were still only paying me six or seven hundred pounds a year. That was the general scale; I wasn't being particularly picked on. I said that everyone in the outside world was earning a lot more money than that. They asked me how much money I would take to stop and I said I'd want at least twelve or thirteen hundred. They were horrified at that prospect. With considerable regret we parted company. I set up doing general psychiatry, but I was also practising analysis. I didn't make any secret that I was a qualified psychoanalyst, but I didn't confine my work to that, and I was still doing a certain amount of ECT in private hospitals and seeing whatever patients I could. I prospered in the general way.

WB: In the beginning how many patients would you have had in psychoanalysis?

HS: When I was still living on South Terrace in the city, prior to 1946, I was no longer doing any general practice. But people used to come and see me there. I think it would have gradually grown from one, two and three and gone on from that. It wasn't until another ten years or more that I restricted myself to analysis. I had been in general psychiatry for quite a while. I can't tell you when I gave up ECT and general psychiatry. It was a gradual change.

WB: You became a training analyst, is that right?

HS: Yes eventually. By this time these Site Visiting people had comeout and we had to go through the process. We were originally a branch of the British Society, an unofficial branch as we called ourselves. We became then what they called a Study Group, that was under the international rules. The Study Group had to be under supervision. When the Site Visiting people came out, we were a study group then, and we became entitled to train. The Site Visiting people were able to decide which of us were entitled to train. Then we could train.

WB: So you applied to train?

HS: Yes, I and Frank Graham and I think Rose Rothfield too. 

WB: I think Janet Neild did too.

• HS: We all became training analysts. So, then I was able to start training in Adelaide which was important for me. There were three doctors for a start. I trained them and they duly became qualified and because I come from a family tradition of running newspapers or journals or whatever, I started a review. My father was a printer originally and then he ran a country newspaper in Katoomba in New South Wales, and then at Kadina in South Australia. Eventually he come to Adelaide and became a Member of Parliament. Even then, he used to run a newspaper. They formed a National Party — he was a Labor man at the start, but then he had some fallout with the Labor people, I think about conscription. I think he was pro-conscription and the Labor Party were against it. I was only fourteen then so what I tell you is mostly hearsay. He ran a newspaper called the Nationalist. He was the editor and main contributor. I was a schoolboy then. Later I was for a year the editor of the Prince Alf'rcd College Chronicle. I was editor of the Medical Student's Chronicle for a while later on. 

WB You had a literary background.

HS Well, I don't know about literary, but it was to do with writing articles. Going back to the Adelaide Review — it wasn't the Adelaide Review then; I used to call it the Australian Review of Psychoanalysis. Sydney people bucked about that; they said I couldn't run this by myself, there had to be a committee to run it, and I said I didn't mind a committee running it but I wasn't going to have the committee telling me what to say and what not to say. Eventually we changed the name and called it just the Adelaide Review. I was quite happy for others to contribute but no one else wanted to contribute. Occasionally they did, if you look in the files. I don't know if Frank has a complete set, has he?

WB: He thought that you might have.

HS: I have too, somewhere. But they're not for sale. I don't want to get rid of them just yet. They're around, anyway.

WB: They're important archive material, I think.

HS: I think the 'Adelaide Group', I think they are called — there are six or eight in Adelaide . I think they will have complete files.

WB: The Institute has an archivist now.

HS: Whenever I found some article in the International Journal or the American Journal or the Quarterly of particular interest, I used to write a review of it and that became material for the papers. There would be other articles too.

WB: That was a lot of work. How often did the review come out?

HS: Well it varied. One glorious year it came out once a month. Twelve issues in one year. Then it went down to once a quarter.

WB: And you sent that around the country?

HS: Yes, to the analysts. It wasn't secret information, but it wasn't a publication in the official sense. It was only sent to members. 

WB: It would have meant a lot of work!

HS: I used to print it myself. We started off in the old days on the old Roneo. My secretary used to type out the Roneos and put it in the machine and turn the handle and it came out that way. Later on I got a bit tired of it and I went into offset printing. I got an offset printing machine second hand, which was easier to use. My secretary used to type out the material on a special form, a specially prepared surface. It had ordinary typescript on it. Then it went through the offset process by which the original is transferred to a rubber that's for the offset; it's mirror-imaged — and the image then goes from the rubber onto the copy. 

WB: Where was this done?

HS: In my rooms. The machine was a huge thing, about as big as this table in area and it came up so high. I mastered it in a week. It only took a couple of hours.

WB: That's terribly important. And it's important that all these records arekept.

HS: I don't know that it's important. It's interesting. 

WB: Historically, I think it's very important.

HS: I used to do my own letterheads and that sort of thing. Of course, then when the computers and photocopying came in, it became obsolete. Nowadays it's not worthwhile. Not long ago, when I retired, I couldn't sell the machine, no one wanted it. I advertised and some fellow was interested. But he never came back. So I decided it wasn't worth trying to sell. One of my grandsons stored it away in his factory at that time, only three or four years ago. He thought he might be able to use it and print some advertising material for his own business, but he never did. I don't think it's worthwhile now. I think they all do it with their computers.

WB: Desktop publishing.

HS: So there's no call for it.

WB: Still, that was a very big thing to achieve.

HS: I enjoyed doing it. It wasn't very expensive. I didn't charge for it of course.

So you did publishing, teaching, supervision, analysis, you were a one man psychoanalytic

HS: I always quite enjoyed doing it. I got tired of it in the end, and no one else wanted to write and I thought well … Anyway, when Iretired from practice, there was no point in it. The Adelaide Society talked about taking it over, and I said, "Well, these days of photo-copying and so on, you wouldn't want to bother with offset printing. They agreed, but never got around to printing anything themselves I think.

WB: It must have been quite a burden for you to be training and teaching and doing analysis. When Sam Stein came you had some sharing then?  

HS It wasn't not such a burden as it might seem. Supervision only took an hour a week. What has to happen — or it used to happen, and it happens all over the world — is that I put an hour a week aside for each of my candidates. Nowadays you have a different supervisor from your analyst, but in those days, there weren't enough to go around, so I used to do both, because there was no one else available. So, the candidates had their analysis at say nine o'clock in the morning, and whoever's turn it was would come along at two o'clock on Friday afternoon or whatever, and have his supervision. So, it didn't mean any extra work for me really, any more than if I'd not been doing training and seeing a private patient.

WB How do you feel you and the candidates managed the transference?

HS People raise these bogies. I wasn't conscious of it being a problem. But of course, the know-alls say, "Oh yes, you were mutually blind to it, and anyone looking would see that there was a lot of hostility hidden there." No doubt the candidates didn't tell me all their hostile thoughts. You could never say everything. As far as my sessions with Clara, from time to time I had a few hostile thoughts. Although I did have this big attack, it was non-directional. I suppose if I'd been more . . . it could have been transferred on, but I didn't feel it belonged to her any more than it belonged to the world. I didn't feel hostility to Clara particularly. Some of the candidates were strongly hostile for a while, but it didn't become a problem as far as the supervision went. I don't think so.

Some of the early analysts you trained with, like Frank and Rose, went overseas for another analysis. Did you think of that at all?

IIS: No. I was well ensconced here, I didn't want to move. If I'd been single and hadn't had any family connections, maybe I would have gone to Melbourne and lived there or maybe I'd have gone to London or New York. But I was happy with the work I was doing, and I didn't have any ambitions to rise higher in the professional world.

WB: Did you find that on the whole psychoanalysis, once you started to practise it in Adelaide, was well accepted by your colleagues and contemporaries ?

HS: That is what you never can tell. There are always no doubt people on the fringe who are detractors, but you heard about that more or less indirectly. There were always enough colleagues, some sort of little infrastructure, which meant that I never had a shortage of patients. I never had a huge waiting list for that matter either. It just kept itself going.

WB: Did the universities approach you at all about teaching?

HS: Yes. That was just incidental. That is another story of course. When I was a medical student, I think we only had — was it three or six lectures a year in psychiatry? Then Daddy Rogers, besides being the superintendent of Enfield, he was also lecturing in psychiatry. Hughie Birch was a lecturer after Dr Rogers. Sometime later he retired and the lectureship in psychological medicine was advertised and I applied and was appointed then. I lectured to the medical students. I was allowed to give twelve lectures a year then.

WB: So that was in general psychiatry?

HS: Yes.

WB: Did you orientate it towards psychoanalysis?

HS: I had to keep to the syllabus. After all you couldn't do much in twelve lectures anyway. When it came to neurosis, we just talked about it. That went on for two or three years, probably three. Then the Mental Health movement started and some Adelaide benefactor  founded the Chair of Mental Health, so they had a Professor of Mental Health for a while. I lost my job then of course. The Professor took it over. Then eventually the University dropped that name, and it became a Chair of Psychiatry. Somebody else took it over then. It's grown a bit since then. That for me was only a very small job because there were only twelve lectures a year, consisting of I think two or three visits to Enfield where we showed a few patients to the students.

WB: When you look at it, virtually the whole of psychotherapy psychoanalysis and a lot of psychhiatry training and teaching, was on your shoulders for many years.

HS: Well it sounds a lot if you put it that way. I don't think I was noted for doing an extraordinary amount of work. I don't think I worked harder than anyone else.

• But it's a huge heritage.

HS It's a large area; but after all, in those days to give twelve lectures in psychiatry, that was all the medical students needed, they reckoned. Even if I'd known a lot more than I did, I wouldn't have had time to tell them what I knew. You only had to give them some sort of guidance.

• I low does it feel to have really started psychoanalysis in South Australia

 I never thought I had started it in South Australia. I was the first one in Adelaide to call myself a psychiatrist. In those days all the doctors used to practise on North Terrace, the same as they used to on Collins Street in Melbourne, and the brass plates would read 'surgery' or 'medicine' or whatever. The BMA or the AMA decided you had to be very careful what you put. You couldn't just say you

specialised in stomachs or something like that, you had to have the right terminology. I was allowed to say I practised in psychiatry. So that is what I did. I was the only one who called myself a psychiatrist for a number of years. Eventually there were several others. Some were raised in the Department; most went into private practice. Mainly because the Department wasn't paying enough money and they weren't free to do what they wanted to do.

WB: When Sam Stein arrived — which would have been when

HS: I can't tell you, it was fairly late. That didn't make a world of difference, because although he was quite welcome, he was content to practise from his home (he still does, I think). He had no particular ambitions to enter into the general field of medicine. He was content to go on quietly. He still takes part in training, I think. 

WBI've got to interview him. I haven't spoken with him; I wanted to speak with you first. Obviously, the Adelaide group is alive and well now.

HS I think so. I've given up going to the meetings. They usually meet in the night-time, and I don't go out that much at night. I usually get to bed by nine or ten o'clock. Also, I think it's best they go their own way. It's nice to have old people along there, but you only learn a certain amount from old people. You might feel that you have a lot of wisdom inside you, but it is only for those who want to listen.

WII: Talking about learning, did you understand when you were working with Clara Geroe that her heritage was from Balint and Ferenczi.

HS Oh yes. They used to talk in a more or less joking way that Balint was sort of a son of Ferenczi. Ferenczi taught Balint, and Balint taught Clara and Clara taught me. So there was this tradition. Balint and Clara were proud of themselves, that they weren't exactly Freud. They were Ferenczians more than Freudians. Balint had achieved status in the British Society. He wasn't exactly wild, but he wasn't as orthodox as some of the others would have wished.

WB: He came out.

HS: Yes, two or three times.

WB: Did you feel terribly cut off, in Adelaide? It must have been difficult for you.

HS: No. Analysis is such an individual business; you don't really need a lot of colleagues to talk about your work all the time. At least I didn't think so. I didn't need it. It was nice in the early stages to discuss your problems, but after a while you went on and did your  work with your individual patient and every patient was different. It was rather different from, say, a surgeon who takes out one appendix after another: there may be a little difference but not very much. But in analysis the difference is the important thing. So for me it was always work that I enjoyed, and I was quite happy to talk about it with others. But I wasn't mad keen to go and hear somebody else talk.

WB: I just wondered if you felt that you would have liked more interaction say with Sydney or with Melbourne

HS: I just accepted that that wasn't the situation. I suppose had it been that Sydney was only twenty miles away then we might well have met more often. It is an isolated thing. If you get a strong group, then you get strong teaching, but it tends to become more rigid. I think that is one of the troubles with analysis everywhere. Even now the British Society pride themselves on being somewhat different from the New York Society, and rightly so you might say. Why not? But had New York been one hundred miles from London then they would never have developed the way they did. It is very hard to say what is going to happen nowadays. General psychiatry has not exactly taken over psychoanalysis, but there is more and more broadening of the field and more and more analytically orientated psycho- therapists around.

WB: Yes, it seems to be happening that way. If you look back now — which you must do I'm sure — how would you have liked it to be different? Better? or the same?

HS: I never think much along those lines. I just take things as they come. All sorts of things might be different. Supposing it had happened the Adelaide authorities had said to me, "You can stay in Melbourne as long as you like, we're quite happy." Maybe I would have stayed in Melbourne as long as I liked. I wouldn't have come back here, maybe. I had to come, but I could well have come back to Adelaide and severed whatever roots I had here and said, "I'm now going off to live in Melbourne", and that would have been that. I would have had a totally different career, presumably. Where it would have gone who knows? I might have still been in Melbourne then. And would I have got tired of Melbourne and gone off to wherever.

Your past has been different from a lot of the others who went away. I know Reg Martin and Frank and Rose went away. But Ian Martin didn't, did he?

• No. Well that became the Kleinian movement, you see. Frank and Rose came back very pro-Kleinian. 

• WB How did you feel about that?

HS I didn't mind. That was all right for them. I didn't have a Kleinian training, and I wasn't terribly impressed with the Kleinians. They felt they had a deeper insight than anybody else. I wasn't able to say they didn't, that it wasn't true. It didn't cause any great split in the Society as far as I was concerned. Everyone has a different perception of his own analysis and his

own needs. I was quite happy with mine. I wasn't looking for anything more than I got. I never did look for anything more.

You must be getting tired. Thank you for letting me talk with you.