The Melanie Klein Trust: Psychoanalysis: Then and Now by Elizabeth Spillius and Edna O’Shaughnessy

The time I shall speak of starts from when I encountered my first psychoanalytic patient - who was myself. I’d a life before then, of course, but I omit it.

In the 1950’s I began an analysis with Dr Charles Anderson, and the night after my first session I had a dream. I shall tell you the dream, because though one meaning is manifest, its unconscious, more interior meanings are hidden – so I shall be able to keep a decent reserve. In my dream I saw a drooling baby sitting on a cloud which was also a pillow. My first ever session had touched me, and I was drooling for more. But the baby in the dream was chubby and I was not – even as a child I had always been skinny. Dr Anderson though was chubby. So what was the dream about? Not telling him my thought that it was he who was chubby (that is, doing a little editing of the kind all patients do), I told him my other associations – which were quite unexpected. And then, how nuanced and surprising Dr Anderson’s understanding of my dream was: unconsciously it linked to a most sad event, not from my infantile past, but from the recent past, and, as emerged in the next few sessions, it had also its connection to my new analyst. Thus, from the start, as is distinctive of a psychoanalysis , the past is there with the present as the psychic reality of a patient starts to emerge in its individuality and interiority.

That was the time of a change of work for me. I had just left the study and teaching of philosophy to become a student at the Tavistock Clinic. Dr Bowlby was its Director, and Mrs Bick with Mattie Harris ran the Child Psychotherapy Course. Melanie Klein was still alive; I used to see her among strawberries and cream and cups of tea at the garden parties given each summer by Dr Bowlby. Later I attended a few seminars she gave to the Child Psychotherapists in training: Mrs Klein listened attentively to our presentations; she said only a few things; whether Mrs Klein had usually so quiet a way or whether it was due to us, or perhaps her age, I do not know; we too were quiet, but that was because we were much in awe. During that time I went to stand in the crowd spilling on to the pavement from the garden of Maresfield Gardens to hear Ernest Jones speak at the unveiling of a blue plaque on Freud’s house. Anna Freud –without notes as always- addressed the crowd too; that was the first time I saw either of them; indeed it was the only time I saw Ernest Jones as he died not long after that.

Meanwhile I had myself started my first patient. Trainees in the NHS were lucky then: our Tavistock training cases came 5 times a week. My first patient was a small boy of not yet three. Mrs Bick was my supervisor. She was an extraordinary psychoanalytic teacher – if one could accept her fierce impact – her vision a shaft of light on the structure and unconscious phantasies of the inner world. Then, as I was about to begin my second case with Betty Joseph as the supervisor, Dr Anderson died suddenly, shockingly – he was 42 years old. I had been his patient for two years . Six months later I began another analysis with Mr Money-Kyrle. The trauma and tension of Dr Anderson’s death and the new beginning with Mr Money-Kyrle, the inner reverberations of those events, the strain of threatening enactments in life and in work – a few done, most averted, were gradually understood and I was much eased.

Somewhile later I made a discovery of another kind. With all the differences that I could see between Dr Anderson and Mr Money-Kyrle – in appearance, as persons, in their analytic style and focus, and in some of my responses too – there was a process of psychoanalysis that was the same. (This is not always people’s experience, of course –but the factors that make for difference or sameness are not my focus to-night.) Without knowing it I must have been very anxious about the objectivity of psychoanalysis. My huge relief that my subjectivity could be communicated, recognised and evolve with Mr Money-Kyrle in the same overall way – even though some particulars were different – as it had with Dr Anderson, meant to me: psychic reality is a part of nature which under psychoanalytic conditions can be known and empirically studied.

To continue with my Child Psychotherapy training. I had a second gifted teacher, her approach different from Mrs Bick’s, as the supervisor of my latency case – Betty Joseph focused on the immediate reciprocal interactions between patient and therapist, and how it is in these that the patient’s anxieties and unconscious phantasies can be found. Next I had Hanna Segal for my adolescent case –again a different experience. My patient was a pre-schizophrenic youth. As well as trying to help me to function in his silences and dead wastelands – which I was finding difficult – Dr Segal also brought to the supervisions a marvellously strong, clear theoretical understanding of his overall predicament.

Once qualified as a Child Psychotherapist I had a practice as a Child Analyst and also a part-time lectureship at the Institute of Education in the Child Development Department that had been started by Susan Isaacs. I remained in touch with the Tavistock and at that time Donald Meltzer gave me some imaginative supervision.

Then, in the ‘60’s I trained at this Institute. Herbert Rosenfeld was my first supervisor. He had an extraordinary understanding of the furthest and strangest reaches of psychic reality and of the intrusive relationships people make with one another. I had Hanna Segal again for my second training case.

All these primary teachers, like primary objects, are still important to me: in conjunction with my analysis from Mr Money-Kyrle they laid my clinical foundation. They did not tie me down, they let me find my own way. I remember an audacious piece of acting out with a member of my family by my first adult patient, a repetition of a secret circumstance in her childhood. I suspected she knew I knew of it. She kept it secret in the analysis too and never spoke of it. Dr Rosenfeld’s view was that I should wait for some aspect of this worrying situation to appear in some form or another in her material; it did not. I grew increasingly anxious and wanted to introduce the subject into the analysis myself. I remember Dr Rosenfeld eventually saying to me 'Well - if you really think so, do it. But that wouldn’t be my technique. Try it - and we can see what happens'. I hope that I, in my turn as a supervisor of subsequent generations, may have given to my students something of what was given to me.

There were also other important personages in the British Society who created the scientific and clinical atmosphere of those times - Adam Limentani, William Gillespie, Michael Balint, Ilse Helman , John Klauber, Pearl King, Walter Joffe, Joe Sandler. And Bion was still there. To my regret I was too late for a supervision with him - he was leaving London for America.

I have worked as a psychoanalyst for 50+ years. That drooling baby (in the dream I told you about at the start of this talk) was yearning for something it needed for itself, and also, at that time, for a different sort of work. I was not disenchanted with philosophy ( I still am not) but philosophy was too purely conceptual – at least for me, and also I think beyond my temperament and capacity. I wanted work more practical and human, and adventurous– and that I have found in psychoanalysis. What has emerged from all these years of analytic experience? One thing is that the particularity of each patient brings always also some aspect of the universal: that’s how clinical practice and theory meet. Another thing is that anxiety – its degree and its content about the self and objects - is central in the psychic reality of our patients and in us in our role as analysts. As an analyst I have seen myself succeed, and fail, and partially fail; I have seen my patients, and the patients of others, in their very different ways change and sometimes fail to change, and how the limits and kind of change may seem to be internal to the patient, and yet anxious questions remain about whether a patient’s limit is only with this or that particular analyst, or whether psychoanalysis itself has as yet discovered no way forward, or whether there is no way forward. You see, I have learnt that it is not always true that when there is a problem there is a solution.

When I started at the Tavistock 50+ years ago I was struck (I think it is not too much to say) I was struck with wonder at the inner psychic landscape, at the psychoanalytic method, at Freudian theory and its Kleinian development. Later, in this Society, I gained a broader focus and knew other developments of Freud, and saw also the perplexities – clinical, theoretical, training, institutional – of the plurality of our psychoanalytic field. Some things have not changed for me. I marvel still at psychic reality and still with each patient – my own or others'– have a sense of privilege and a complex expectancy about the unknown, and, it must be added, hazardous analytic journey. But these days I am more aware than I used to be of all the territory we do not understand.

I am grateful for my long working life in the BPAS. I know I have sometimes given offence here, and I confess, I have also taken offence, but such things, like some of the Society’s repetitive frustrations, are far outweighed by the sharing of common anxieties and the many pleasures and the pride of being a member of the British Society.

When you are old, and look back, sometimes you want to say: ‘O call back yesterday, bid time return.’ (Richard II:III, ii, 54) it is a wish for the chance to do things again, differently or better. More often though I find I want to say: ‘Let me see into the future. How will psychoanalysis be?’ Will it have been transformed by some new genius? - in ways I, we, cannot now imagine.