Introductory Comments

Christine Vickers PhD

Judy Cassab's original portrait of Clara Lazar Geroe in the home of the late George Geroe, where the interviews were conducted. Courtesy of the Geroe family.

Photograph: Chris Vickers 2025.

During the early 1990s, the psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist Wendy Brumley began researching the History of psychoanalysis in Australia. Her project included oral history interviews with senior members of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society as well as other figures in the field. Two have been published, under Brumley's editorship, in the Australian Journal of Psychotherapy: Dr Harry Southwood in 1994 and Dr Frank Graham in 1995. Southwood and Graham represent Australia's first generation of trained psychoanalysts. Dr Geroe trained both during the 1940s. OHD Blomfield's interview, recorded in 1993, has not been published before. It was passed on to me by Brumley’s son in 2020. It appears that Brumleey also interviewed with Dr Reg Martin ( Blomfield, 1993) and Professor Graham Smith. We do not know why Brumley did not proceed with this project. She has, however, left us with the gift of three interviews now published here. 

As source material, an oral history provides a path into the reflexive space between the interviewer and interviewee. Set up to record the subject's memories of times past, the transference-countertransference dialectic between the interviewer and interviewee inevitably influences the outcome ( Roper, 2003; Holmes, 2017 ). I well remember my interview with Dr George Geroe about his mother, Dr Klara Geroe in 2013 (Psychoanalysis Downunder#12 ). It was recorded on a winter’s day in the sitting room in his Castlemaine home under the watchful gaze of Klara's magnificent portrait. A friend and fellow Hungarian emigre, Judy Cassab, painted this. George Geroe had thought deeply about what he wanted to say. Sometimes, he ignored my anxious, stumbling questions to make his point. He wanted to tell the world who his mother was, even if he had found her difficult, charming, and an idealist all at the same time. For me, the crossing from analytic therapist to historian sometimes felt rudderless. Would this question or that open the space for him? I would wonder. I need not have worried. It was best to let George have his head and throw away my carefully planned questions so he could tell it his way. His wife, Ann Geroe, an artist, ceramicist, and champion of her in-laws, provided photographs. 

 George’s portrayal of his mother alerts us to her experiences of Hungary's enormous social and political struggles after the collapse of the Hapsburg Monarchy in 1916 and, in the 1930s, the Geroe family's decision to emigrate. George said that the push behind it came from his father. He saw what was coming. Klara, of course, thought it a bad idea. She had found her niche in Budapest’s psychoanalytical world, realising her adolescent dreams of leaving the dreary provincial town of Papa for the lively intellectual scene of the metropole.   George's witnessing of his parents' homesickness and efforts to adjust to Australian life while retaining their connections with the world they had left behind is poignant and loving. And then, of course, Klara's professional experiences in Budapest, her training with Michael Balint, Sandor Ferenczi and Alice Balint, had an impact on the developing Australian psychoanalytical community from the 1940s.

During the interview, we learn about his memories of Budapest's psychoanalytic scene ( Geroe, 2013; Borgos, 2021) and his mother's love for Anna Freud. His mother 'always' was a psychoanalyst', George related. He cannot recall when there was no psychoanalytic practice at home. There is a lot more to discover. George may not have known about her work as a 'counsellor' with the political organisations: the Child-Friendly Association of Hungarian Labourers in the early 1930s ( Vickers, 2024) nor her chapter, included in Freud’s 1933 Festschrift for Sandor Ferenczi based upon her work with children( Freud, 1933).     

In an oral history interview, memories are contingent on time, place, emotions, and feelings. These include those generated by the dialectic between the interviewer and interviewee. Chains of associations and memories, all emotionally resonant with one another,  begin to unfold. However, this is not an analysis. An interviewee often tries to produce what the interviewer wants. The historian, wishing to be the best possible oral historian interviewer, has carefully prepared (Roper, 2003). Both are imagining a future listener and reader. The record will be scrutinised and assessed by readers and historians. All of them will bring their *particular* membership of the cultural and social unconscious to bear upon interpretation. In her interview with Bill Blomfield, Wendy Brumley speculates on the relationship between the two senior Hungarian analysts who dominated the Australian scene in the 1960s and 1970s – Klara Geroe and the younger Vera Roboz. Like Melanie Klein and her daughter Melitta Schmideberg, she wonders? 

Hardly!! I would say. However, Brumley's context, the recent publication of King's and Steiner's The Controversial Discussions (King and Steiner, 1991), is in her mind. We are suddenly linked to Australia's Britishness and glimpse the bitterness of the disputes between Roboz and Geroe, which Blomfield also remarks upon. Blomfield, however, refuses to be drawn. Oral History interviews will provide accidental clues about what was happening in people’s minds at the time. To read and listen to these interviews is to peer into another time when the rules, constraints, and restraints of the social unconscious of the day become apparent through their difference from the present. Making History is inevitably an analysis of the social unconscious of a particular time.  

So, we begin with Harry Southwood, who relates his experience of a training analysis with Dr Geroe. It would not pass muster in 1993 and certainly not in 2025. Yet for Geroe, from 1940 to 1949, the sole full member of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Australia, always waiting for a second analyst who never arrived, despite Jones's optimism, there was little choice. For her first five years in Australia, her position as a refugee, able to work in the community and earn enough to support her family, depended on the Board of the Melbourne Institute, chaired by Dr Paul Dane ( Vickers, 2024). 

Southwood's training, commuting back and forth between Adelaide and Melbourne, was an 'experiment', she wrote in 1950. At her disposal was her own experience as a trainee with Dr Michael Balint and the Budapest tradition advocating that the trainee's analyst conducted Control Analyses. ( Kovács 1936, Balint 1954). Their argument that the intimate knowledge of the candidate’s inner world could only be known and worked with by their analyst was the foundation of this method is unthinkable nowadays. Geroe acknowledged in 1977 that techniques and understanding of the transference between patient and analyst had developed considerably since the 1930s (C Geroe 1982, p 356). However, for readers of Southwood's account about how ‘they’ did things 'back then', there is a chance to witness psychoanalysts working out their method.

At the time of his interview, Southwood, born in 1907, was about eighty-five. He was an old man without the clarity of his younger years. It appears he wants to settle several matters. Of course. he enjoys regaling his listeners with stories of his early life and career. Unlike in his interview with Andrew Dibdin in 1979,  he does not provide the detail of the very real influence of another German Émigré Karl Winter, an analytically trained doctor who arrived with his Jewish wife in flight from the Nazis in 1933 ( Dibden & Southwood, 1979). Instead, he is worried about several other matters concerning his role in the Australian Psychoanalytical Society: his role in the development of the journal, The Adelaide Review, a private publication he founded and edited, and of the course, the sustainability of the Australian Psychoanalytical Association who, in his view, lost its status as a Branch of the British Society in the 1950s. 

It is not clear what Australia’s status was in the early 1950s, even though at times it was referred to as a ‘Branch’. In 1939, Ernest Jones directed Dr Paul Dane, the founder of the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis, to the IPA Training Secretary Max Eitington. He said it was an essential part of establishing an analytic institute. Dane did not follow this instruction. Any correspondence placing the Australian group in a defined relationship with the British Centre has either been lost or does not exist.     

Frank Graham's interview, published in 1995, provides a coherent account of his early life and decision to train as an analyst, providing information about the people involved and his motivation. He is eager to help Brumley. Perhaps he could provide some documents for her? He speaks astutely about Dr Geroe, what she provided for him and her limitations. Importantly, Graham discusses his decision to go to England for a Kleinian analysis. Several colleagues, including Rose Rothfield. Stanley Gold and later George Christie made the journey. He speaks of the simmering jealousy from those who stayed behind in response to those who went. 

Surprising for Brumley was recognition that 'Australia really must have received psychoanalytic thinking quite easily, quite readily and quickly. I have always had the impression that Australia was much more closed than it was’. ( Brumley 1995, p. 12). Her insight is borne out today by access to Australia’s digitised newspaper collection, 'Trove' at the Australian National Library. Reading these newspapers from the past provides an opportunity to see what our Australians knew about psychoanalysis and what they thought about it. The fact that the Australian press closely followed Freud's escape from Vienna in 1938 suggests significant knowledge and interest.  

Bill Blomfield’s interview is the third in the series. A member of the next generation of Australia’s trained analysts, following Graham and Southwood, Blomfield underwent analysis in Britain with Henry Ezriel following a flying accident in which he was badly burnt. After returning to Australia in the late 1950s, he began his training analysis with Frank Graham in the early 1960s. 

Even through the medium of a written transcript, Blomfield's measured voice dominates the proceedings with Brumley. He provides a nuanced account of the history of Australian psychoanalysis with his wife, Jocelyn Dunphy Blomfield. He refuses to be drawn on matters of contention and offers his assistance to Brumley. More importantly, he introduces Vera Roboz, the Hungarian Émigré psychoanalyst who arrived in 1957. He points out her connection with the neurologist Lipot Szondi, the creator of fate analysis – and his argument that there was a genetic foundation for one's fate. Blomfield holds his mind open on that question, leaving more for exploration. 

The participants in Brumley's interviews have provided the richness of their encounter with the Hungarian School, their movement to the British Centre, and the foundations of the Australian psychoanalytic project as it is today. Each has chosen what they want to relate, recognising Brumley's potential role as a recorder and interpreter. 

For a reader, thirty years on, it is clear that the world has changed since 1993. Australia is now more focused on its place in the Pacific- South East Asian Region than in the mid-1990s. At that time, Britain, at the centre of the international psychoanalytic project, was the place for inspiration, learning and development. The marked presence of the Hungarians in the Australian psychoanalytic story was, at that time, one of its worries. They seemed not quite de rigeur, perhaps odd, even though they had a few good ideas, particularly about infants and children. And then, problematically, was the ‘Hungarian method’ of training analysis that Geroe had brought with her. That Mrs Roboz and Dr Geroe were deeply conflicted was acknowledged. It is striking that few, if anyone, at that time wondered whether that conflict might have originated in Hungary. Or what, indeed, the Hungarian School had contributed to the international psychoanalytical project. Perhaps it seemed to be too far away? 

Klara Geroe’s writing

Although she brought copies of her publications and lectures with her to Australia, Geroe translated only a few for use in her ‘popular lectures’ for parents and teachers. As Frank Graham notes, Geroe brought her experiences in outreach and ‘social work’ with families and children from Budapest – unexpected and undoubtedly different from Melbourne's medical world. Possibly child guidance, seen by some medical practitioners as the province of ‘Green haired' women psychologists was not the ‘real’ psychoanalysis the Australians wanted. Unfamiliar with Ferenczi’s advocacy ‘to return to the nursery’ to understand child development ( Ferenczi, 1908), the Australians were keener to learn more about Freud’s teachings. Ferenczi’s advocacy for the return to the nursery to research child development (Ferenczi, 1908) had not reached Australia. ’ Geroe’s contribution, Nevelesci Tanacsadas ( Child Guidance)  to   Freud's Festschrift for Ferenczi intended for Ferenczi’s sixtieth birthday in 1933 thus remained unnoticed. 

I have included this paper, with all the case studies. These are short-term treatments possibly conducted as part of Geroe's work, possibly in 1931, with the Hungarian Society's polyclinic, which opened under Margaret Dubovitz’s direction in 1928. Developed in consultation with Michael Balint, Geroe's interventions reflect the Clinic's policy.  She is, however, clear about the difference between the work she describes and a longer term treatment, including one of these in her examples. Even at this point, while Geroe acknowledges the importance of Klein's work, she leans toward Anna Freud’s interpretation of development. 

Case III is a little different from the others. To my mind Klara leans into opinion rather than interpretation. She appears to be scathing towards ‘the boy’s’ mother. There are similarities between this case study and her own circumstances – including her fight for an education where she and her father formed an alliance to ‘outvote’ mother ( see George Geroe interview). By all accounts, too, she suffered ill health when she was a child. (Linksz 1986). Perhaps as a result of her analysis she was still working things out.   

Reading this valuable source, we must rely on the translation app, 'Deepl', to explore the thinking and ideas behind Geroe's early Australian contribution. Sitting as it does, alongside papers by her colleagues, including Alice Balint and Kata Levy, who travelled with her for fortnightly seminars on child development and analysis with Anna Freud in Vienna ( Borgos, 2021), it shows the importance of this exchange for the developmental matrix of child analysis during the 1930s. How much have these experiences been transmitted into Australian psychoanalytic culture down generations?   

Bibliography

Balint, M. (1954). Analytic training and training analysis, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 35: 157.

Borgos, A. (2021). Women in the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis: Girls of Tomorrow, London, Routledge.

Dibdin, Andrew ( 1979). Transcript of interview with Dr Harry Southwood by Dr Andrew Dibdin, for Psychiatry in South Australia Oral History Project, 3 November 1979, PRG 842/1/2, State Library of South Australia. 

Ferenczi, S ( 1908 ). Psychoanalysis and Education. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30 :220-224 (1949).

Freud, Sigmund, et al (1933), Lélekelmemzési tanulmányok: Dolgozatok a pszichoanalízis főbb kérdéseiről, Somló Béla Könyvkiadó, Budapest. https://archive.org/details/1933-lelekelemzesi/page/124/mode/2up

Geroe, C. (1977).  A reluctant immigrant. Meanjin, 3/1982.

King, P. & Steiner, R. (1991). The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45. London, Routledge.

Roper, M. (2003). Analysing the analysed: Transference and countertransference in the oral history encounter, Oral History 31(2): 20–32.

Holmes, K.( 2017). Does it matter if she cried? Recording Emotions and the Australian Generations Oral History Project, The Oral History Review, 44(1): 56–76.

Kovács, V. ( 1936). Training and control analysis, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 17: 346.

Linksz, A. (1986). Fighting the third death. New York,  Julia Linksz.

Vickers, C. (2024), The experiences of the migrant child: The Hungarian Psychoanalyst Klara Lazar Geroe: Australia's first training analyst 1940-1946, Psychoanalysis and History 26(3):259-290