Ivy Bennett's Letter
IVY BENNETT
INTRODUCTION
Christine Brett Vickers
During 2011 I had a brief correspondence with Ivy Bennett, a Western Australian born woman who in 1946 took up her British Council Scholarship and eventually trained as a psychoanalyst. Although very frail and ill she took the time to write an account of her professional life in Australia. She was Australia’s first BPAS lay analyst, practising in Perth from 1952 to 1958. She died on 6 December 2011. This is a link to her obituary Ivy Bennett
I had written to her after discovering reports of her activities and plans in Western Australia’s newspapers during a search of Australia’s digitized newspaper collection, Trove, at the National Library of Australia website. This was the beginning of my research.
I was astonished to learn of her. More so was the calibre of reportage of psychoanalytic ideas. Perth was the home of an inspirational teacher, Psychology Professor Hugh Lionel Fowler whose war record shows that in 1919 he planned to spend his decommissioning year year at University College London ‘studying psychoanalysis’, at government expense. While this is not entirely correct – he studied psychology - it shows psychoanalytic ideas were circulating at the time. Reporters had followed her career, via scholarships, from her hometown in Lake Grace in Western Australia’s wheatbelt, through school, university and finally a British Council Scholarship to England in 1946. During visits home in 1950 and 1951 she spoke of her plans to establish a psychoanalytic practice in Perth.
I think Bennett deserves recognition in the archive of Australian Psychoanalytic History. She was an early member of the Australian Association of Psychoanalysts and a respected colleague of this early group memberships. However, she was not well accepted by local Perth doctors and had a difficult time. So much so that she returned to England with a view of training from Associate to full membership of BPAS. However, marriage intervened and she and her husband moved to the United States where she resided in Kansas for the rest of her life.
Bennett highlights the Australian women who made their way to England and distinguished psychoanalytic careers. Ruth Thomas who left for London in 1933 became Anna Freud’s Director of Training as well as a psychoanalyst and member of BPAS. Cecily de Monchaux who followed her footsteps was Bion's respondent when he presented his paper, 'A Theory of Thinking' at the 1961 IPA Edinburgh Congress. Still another, was Maria Kawenowka a Polish refugee who had befriended Klara Geroe in Melbourne following her arrival in Australia. With Geroe’s encouragement Kawenowka re-emigrated to London. She eventually joined Joseph Sandler’s Child Psychoanalsyis Indexing Committee.
You will note in the text that Bennett refers to a Miss M. who was early on associated with psychoanalysis. One hypothesis is that this was Muriel Matters, a Western Australian woman who, in England, was a suffragette. I think she was the one who chained herself to the railings around the parliament house there. She later married, becoming Muriel Matters Porter. She used to teach children in the East End of London. There is a Mrs Porter listed in the early, 1920s) membership of BPAS. More research is needed, however.
At the end of this letter (not included) Bennett remarked she did not want to be ‘studied.’ I think, however, that she would be delighted to be included in this series of oral histories, taking her place amongst her Australian colleagues, Frank Graham and Harry Southwood as well as Bill Blomfield.
The letter was previously published by me in 2017 as “Ivy Bennett's Memoir: Excavating the history of psychoanalysis in Australia”, Australian Journal of Psychotherapy 35(2). The photographs of her are from newspaper clippings.
Images of Ivy Bennett
1949 1950 195
IVY BENNETT’S LETTER
6 August 2011
Your letter reached me just before my 92nd birthday and as I was leaving for a 'magic' drug RITOXIN chemotreatment (wasn't it developed by Australian scientists?) for another bout of chronic Lymphatic Leukaemia - (the first trial did well) - so at my age and frailty your wished for correspondence is likely to be limited. ( I have severe degenerative arthritis in the hands, so please forgive my scrawly handwriting - I am computer illiterate still ... and fatigue easily).
First let me correct a few wrong impressions you seem to have picked up. No I was not the first Western Australian Psychoanalytic Graduate from the London Institute of Psychoanalysis. There were two others. (1) Miss - M? alas her name escapes me now - who was and educational psychologist trained under Dr Cameron who was himself educated Ed PhD at the London Institute of Education. Alas this lady who had a great reputation for helping school learning problems in the thirties unfortunately died early, before I was senior enough to meet her.
Second: There was Ruth Thomas, also a Cameron - University of Western Australia School of Education Grad, and once his 'Reader' and Secretary, which Summer position he also offered me and I found myself in her footsteps during the war. I knew her well in London and she became one of Anna Freud's inner circle of "B" group analysts when the Institute split into A Group( Klein) and B group training. ( A time of very ugly fights).
But let me go back to pre-war years in Perth. Remember when I first left Western Australia on the British Council Scholarship of 1945, the population of Australia was only six million and the 'White Australia Policy' reigned. By then end of the war and with all the influx of New Australians ( as we called them) and the abolishment of "White Australia' only, the number reached ten million. I can remember when there were only 65,000 people living north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Times are changed!
I remember it was a very British Community. Everyone seemed to have relatives in the 'old country'. Many soldiers from the British Indian Regiments had retired to Perth, preferring its temperate climate to the cold English weather after India. Also the RSL ( Returned Soldiers League) from WWI was very active in country areas where I was at school in Lake Grace in the 20s and 30s - English, Scots and Irish - many had sailed to Fremantle from Southampton on a WWI Farmer's Settlement Scheme. Also when I reached the University of Western Australia I found most of our professors were English - or Welsh - Londoners mostly. Professor Cameron (Education), Professor Fox ( Philosophy) and Dr Fowler (Psychology) had all done their degrees in London and looked that way from conferences and sabbaticals. So had Professor Murdoch ( English).... via 5 week Cunard Liners: Perth to Liverpool trips).
We seemed to have little to do with the Eastern States. You may remember we tried to secede in 1929. I was then 10 years old and remember marching down Lake Grace streets with schoolmates bearing pro-secession messages. We were unanimous!!
UNIVERSITY EDUCATION
1937-1939: I took a BA degree in Modern Literature ( English, French and Poetry) in Murdoch's time. Then Professor Cameron offered me the Summer job as his Reader and at the end of this I had decided to switch my MA major from Natural History ( Zoology and Biology) to Psychology. There was a lot of dispute between the Philosophy School (Professor Fox) and Psych ( Dr Fowler who had obtained his PhD under Spearman) regarding the question: 'was psychology a science or not?' I gained my MA in Psych ( clinical methods) in 1943 but meantime it was war-time and most of our male staff had joined up and it was not unusual for senior students to become instructors and take over the classes we had just completed. This happened to me ( and others). From 1942 to 1945 I became a lecturer on Dr Fowler's staff. At this time the clinical department ran a Child Guidance Clinic with the participation of a Scottish psychiatrist - Dr Murdoch from Perth's Heathcote Mental Hospital staff; much vocational guidance work for the Army and RAAF. We were also involved in the intelligence testing of 59 children whose mothers had had Rubella. This led to the discovery of 'Rubella Retardation' ( HQ In Adelaide).
As well as working with returning Veterans I also put in a summer at Western Command Area Hospital where Major Gordon Bennett arranged rehabilitation and vocational guidance for Aussie prisoners of war released from Japanese Prisoner of War camps, often with hands and tongues cut off - Very grim for us young 'half-baked' psychologists.
In 1944 I was awarded a Hackett Scholarship to study with Florence Goodenough in Minnesota; but was not able to take it up because the dollar exchange was stopped during the war. I had also applied for the British Council Scholarship but they said I was "too young" . I went on with full lecturing duties in the Psych department and applied again in 1945 and this time it was awarded to me.
I sailed in January 1946 on a troop ship to Liverpool with elegant 'letters of introduction' written in scholarly handwriting from Drs Cameron and Fowler and others to their colleagues and friends in London. These proved very useful when the British Council Supervisor, after enrolling me for a PhD with Professor Cyril Burt at University College London Psych Department also allowed me a 6 month tour around England and Scotland comparing child guidance clinics. I was interested in clinical methods of treatment of disturbed children.
Meantime I had met Ruth Thomas who led me to Miss Freud's and Kate Friedlander's big experiment in West Sussex where the case work for my PhD thesis was done ( recorded in the text book: "Delinquent and Neurotic Children: A Comparative Study, published in London in 1959 by Tavistock Press and in 1960 in NY Basic Books - more details on the Anna Freud Centre Website).
RETURN TO AUSTRALIA
I obtained my PhD in 1951 simultaneously with graduating in the inaugural class ( 1947-51) at Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic and gained Associate Membership in British Psychoanalytic Society , also in 1951. I returned to Western Australia at the end of 1952, built a practice in a lovely spot at 32 Bellevue Terrace, right near the top of Mount Stirling and the nearby gates of King's park - did well there ( 1953-1957) and attended international conferences in Switzerland, Paris and London as well as interstate conferences at Melbourne ( Dr Clara Geroe), Sydney ( Bondi Peto) and Adelaide (Southwood).
When I returned to Perth in 1952 I made no attempt to take up my old academic lectureship. I just hung up my shingle in 1953 and began and was busy up to 13 hours a day - the old Army referrals continued (Government paid) and I had organised a group of interested paediatricians with a fortnightly evening meeting in my apartment on the psychoanalytic approach to child rearing as practised by Anna Freud in her war-work with evacuated children and later at the Hampstead Clinic.
Meanwhile the war was over. The men came wanting their jobs back - a new staff took over after Dr Fowler ( a WWI vet) had sadly died and they showed little interest in my quiet work. I was seeing mostly adults at that time and avoided publicity.
At Miss Freud's "Wednesday meetings" I had met many famous visitors and we graduating students provided the programmes. One of these was Marie Bonaparte who gave me great encouragement and also Dr Clara Geroe, Hungarian colleagues of AF and DB. Dr Geroe invited me to the Melbourne meetings( we then had 9 analysts in Australia) and asked me to repeat a paper she had heard me read on the long work we did with the Concentration Camp children from Theresienstadt and Belsen ( reported elsewhere). She made me very welcome in Melbourne and I met the other Hungarian Dr Bondi Peto ( was president of the Sydney Group) and we were all enthusiastic and enjoyed our meetings thoroughly. This was before all the Graham fights and Klein controversies began to upset meetings.
[I met Dr Peto again in New York at a conference after I had married and migrated to the USA and he and his wife were living in a pent house in NY and were happier there (than in Australia)].
I should go back to several other Western Australians who trained in London. Nancy Stewart, who encouraged by me, applied for training at the Anna Freud Centre, was accepted, several years after me. She graduated and returned to do sterling work in Perth in the Child Guidance Centre - where another male psychologist whom I had analysed (5 times a week for three years) also worked and they became a very reliable psychoanalytically orientated child therapy team. ( Both died too early).
Another good ally in Perth was Dr Haydn Williams who was head of the Technical School in Perth, and who had also been one of my A students in PsychIII days. He did his PhD (Education) degree in London at the Institute of Education the same time I was at UCL, both near the British Museum where we had the great privileges in those days. ( No more so alas!) and a first rate cafeteria... in those post war days we were still rationed. Williams specialised in adolescent vocational guidance and was often able to solve practical problems in educating the disturbed children (and Veterans) we saw in great numbers in Perth.
I must not close without mentioning Dr Cecily de Monchaux. Cecily was a Sydney graduate in psychology, very proud of her half French half Aussie heritage; who took on my job on Dr Fowler's staff when I left. A few years later she also won a British Council Scholarship and came in my footsteps to London. She was analysed by Dr Willi Hoffer, a stanch friend and supported of Anna Freud and soon came into the Hampstead circle. We became good friends but she was not so much interested in therapy as in teaching. After her PhD degree on 'Levels of Aspiration' published in the International Psychoanalytic Journal, she became a lecturer on the staff of UCL and played a big part in the founding of th first Chair of Psychoanalysis at UCL with Professor Joseph Sandler - another Hoffer pupil who had been the chief leader of
Miss Freud's Index Committee. Professor Burt wrote to me at this time asking if I knew 'more students from UWA of the calibre of yourself and Miss de Moncheaux'? So the traffic went two ways.
Cecily unfortunately died of a brain tumor just after she had married at the age of 53 years. Greatly missed - a born teacher.
Now... this effort has taken me (with interruptions) all the long weekend before I go into chemotherapy again –
….like Miss Freud I would say...'let them guess'... my efforts were way in the past...
Best Wishes
Ivy Gwynne-Thomas