Life, Sex and Death

Selected Writings of William Gillespie

Michael Sinason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134796700
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A distinguished and revered elder of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, Dr William Gillespie is one of the few British psychoanalysts who began training in the Vienna of the early 1930s. Later he became well known in England for his pioneering studies of sexual perversion, and for his views on female sexuality, regression in old people facing death, and on instinct theory.

William Gillespie is celebrated not only for his scientific contributions but also for his administrative skill, integrity and tact in managing the International Psycho-Analytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society, where he was trusted and respected by both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.

In a biographical introduction the editor, Dr Michael Sinason, looks back on the productive 90 years of Gillespie's life, writing movingly of his early life in China and Scotland and showing his development as a psychoanalytic thinker, organizer and administrator, husband and father. Dr Charles Socarides, an American psychoanalyst eminent in the field of perversion and its treatment, discusses the innovations introduced by each of the papers in the collection shows how Gillespie's ideas influenced by his own contributions and affected the field as a whole.

PART ONE

Introduction to the papers

1

Biographical introduction

DR MICHAEL SINASON

I first met William Gillespie as the fleetingly glimpsed husband of my training analyst Sadie Gillespie. A few more impressions were gathered from exchanges on the telephone when I had to leave a message. William was courteous and precise in his tone and manner but also engagingly blunt and direct in sorting out any ambiguities in my messages. He seemed an able ‘minder’ for his wife in the event that this should be needed in the course of the analysis. These impressions did not alter when, some years after the end of my training analysis, I came to know Sadie and William socially, but I was also then able to enjoy William’s wry sense of humour and sharp character assessments. I had also, of course, heard during my training about William’s years as President of the British Society and President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. William, however, rarely referred to the famous analysts or the political events as I expected. I eventually discovered that this was based on a deep dislike and distrust of grandiosity or pomposity that meant that he was averse even to acknowledging his achievements let alone to trumpeting them. Sometimes Sadie or colleagues would complain to William about his modesty, but he would then impishly enjoy quoting Churchill’s memorable but cruel characterisation of Clement Attlee as ‘a modest little man with much to be modest about’.

When the plans for this book began to take shape I made a strong bid to include with the papers two chapters which would redress the balance and allow William’s contributions to British and international psychoanalysis to be voiced. In this chapter I provide a biographical outline so that the reader can map his outstanding clinical and organisational achievements on to the nine decades of his personal life. In the next chapter, Charles Socarides reviews William’s contributions to the psychoanalytic literature and identifies the influence his papers have had on the understanding of sexuality, the perversions and the destructive instincts and on the direction of subsequent work in these fields. Most of the facts about William’s life that follow were provided for me by William from autobiographical notes he made about ten years ago, from other material in the British Society Archives and from conversations I had with William. I am also indebted to Sadie Gillespie, Pearl King, Jill Duncan and Elizabeth Spillius for their assistance with information for this chapter and for their contribution to other aspects of the preparation of the book. William’s daughter Veronica helped to find early family photographs to supplement those in Sadie and William’s own collection and those in the archives of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

Despite the Scottish origins of the Gillespie family name, William’s grandfather was a bank manager in the Northern Irish town of Newry, County Down. In the Protestant community there were many religious divisions and in 1858 he left the Church of Ireland to join the Irish Presbyterian Church, which he actively served, eventually becoming, in 1930, at the age of 91, a presbyter, the term for an elder in the governing body. He lived to see William’s son in 1934 but died the following year.

William remembers his grandfather as an imposing Victorian with a fine beard and the delectable habit of distributing gold half-sovereigns on his birthdays. He sent all but one of his seven children to university to study medicine, theology or both. Two of the three children who became doctors worked as medical missionaries and two were members of the clergy, so the majority were professionally concerned with religion. The education of these children was a formidable financial undertaking. It was, however, funded in a manner more expected of the impecunious. Each child sent to university had to reimburse him later on so that the next in line could be financed. Although this strategy was accepted as part of the practice, in large families, of shifting some responsibilities of parenting to older siblings, such shifts leave the older children with a dislocated but lingering experience of deprivation, and William’s father did not escape this.

William’s father was born in 1867. He took an arts degree in Dublin and followed this up with theological training at Galway University. He was fluent in Greek and Hebrew. After his ordination he spent most of his life as a clerical missionary in China. William’s mother was also born in County Down but his parents did not know of each other’s existence until they met in Manchuria! She had gone to work as a ‘Zenana’ missionary, working, that is, for the Women’s Association for Foreign Missions. She too had started as a member of the Church of Ireland but transferred her allegiance to the Irish Presbyterian Church. Her father had been a petty officer in the Royal Navy and then went into the Coastguard Service stationed on the island of Arran, where she developed a love for Scotland that affected her decision later to live there. William’s mother was the eldest in her sibship and her two younger sisters also worked as Zenana missionaries in Manchuria. His mother lived to nearly 90 years and both these aunts lived far into their 90s. William’s mother relished the family connection with the Duke of Hamilton and told William how she remembered her father receiving letters from the Duke addressed to ‘My dear Cousin’. His mother’s maiden name was Isabella Burgoyne Grills. One of the Burgoynes was the general in the American War of Independence who was defeated at Saratoga. His mother illustrated that the ancestry of the Burgoynes dated back to the fourteenth century by quoting a doggerel:

I, John of Gaunt

Do give and do grant

To Johnny Burgoyne and all of his loin Sutton and Potten until the world’s rotten.

There are two tiny villages called Sutton and Potten only a mile or so apart in Bedfordshire, near Biggleswade, which appear to be the places designated by John of Gaunt.

William’s father arrived in China in 1893 and married two years later. Their first child, Annie, was born in 1896, followed by two girls in rapid succession, Harriet and Ethel, the latter being born in July 1899. Soon after this, in the summer of 1900, there occurred the Boxer uprising. Though it is regarded in the West as a simple expression of and-foreignism, its roots lay in the inability of Confucian orthodoxy to provide for the needs of the common man. In Shantung, where economic conditions were poor, young men banded together studying the ancient arts of self-defence—‘Chinese boxing’—so that they could protect the poor from exploitation. Later, they became increasingly hostile to officials and foreigners. The movement caused great disruption and hardship and some loss of life to the missionaries in China, not least in Manchuria.

During the last years of the nineteenth century foreign missionaries in large numbers went deep into Shantung villages, where they converted people, tore down traditional temples, and built churches. The Boxers were initially much more hostile to the Chinese Christians and those Chinese officials, who aided the foreigners. However, the Empress Dowager tried to deflect the movement’s growing violence away from the dynasty and towards the foreigners and their reformist officials, who were seen as trying to subvert Manchu rule. In the early months of 1900 the Boxers swept across the countryside of north China, burning and looting missionary settlements and slaughtering thousands of Chinese Christians. Boxer ranks were swelled with mobs of destitute vagrants who had been driven off their land by famine, flood and drought. In their desperation they found the Boxer sorcery, mysticism and promise of supernatural powers (which would make them immune to bullets) most seductive.

On 13 July 1900, the Boxers stormed into Peking and laid siege to the eleven foreign legations, while the Chinese government ignored the foreigners’ desperate pleas for protection. Finally, in mid-August, allied troops broke through from Tientsin to relieve the haggard, frightened prisoners of the besieged legations, and Boxer resistance quickly disintegrated, leaving the troops of the international force to take revenge on the Chinese by looting and raping. However, fortunately, the Gillespie family had gone on holiday leave in

William’s father (centre) and fellow missionaries with their congregation.

February of that year, so they were not personally involved, although their house, where the three girls had been born, was destroyed.

In December 1904, when his mother was 40 years old, William was conceived. He was born on 6th August 1905 and was given the same forenames, William Hewitt, as his father. William was born in Pei-Tai-Ho, which is not in Manchuria but in China proper. The family were spending the summer there because it was an attractive seaside resort much patronised by the missionaries for holidays. It is situated just south of the Great Wall, about 160 miles directly east of Peking, approximately on the 40th parallel. The first three years of William’s life were spent in China, although the experiences inevitably disappeared into the mists of infantile amnesia. However, he visited Pei-Tai-Ho again later and remembers the beautiful sand, the heat and the rock pools.

Westerners who went to China in the nineteenth century branded the Chinese an inferior race and reviled them as heathens whose souls had to be transformed before they could become fully human. Every revolt against oppressive rule was bloodily put down, with the effect of creating ever more revolutionaries. City and village drifted apart in early twentieth-century China. The cities became Westernised and a part of the world market system which foreign imperialism had created. Shanghai, for example, became more a European than a Chinese city. The villages, although affected by the new cities, retained much of their traditional heritage. William remembers meals being

William (in pram) and his sisters in China, 1906.

served by the ‘boy’—actually a mature man—whom he came to like but could not communicate with well owing to his parents’ policy that the children were on no account to learn Chinese lest they be led astray by their heathen ways. Every European family had three servants, which was de rigueur, for no Chinese would have accepted employment without this minimal establishment. There was the cook, who also did the shopping, the ‘boy’—a sort of butler—and the lowest rung was occupied by the coolie, who did all the dirty jobs.

The strains of this social structure broke out one night when William’s father was away ‘itinerating’. The cook crept up to his sister Ethel’s room and said that he was cold and wanted to get into her bed to get warm. Ethel, innocent though she was, knew enough not to allow this and went through to her mother’s bedroom. His mother immediately woke William, took both the children into her room and armed herself with a hammer. She then shouted to the cook that if he tried to come in she would kill him. William and his sister can still remember her Chinese words. The cook there upon fled the house. He was subsequently arrested and William’s father later had to question Ethel to prepare himself to give evidence, asking her ‘You wouldn’t have allowed him to get into your bed, would you?’, to which she replied ‘Of course not—a Chinese!’ The official family explanation was that the cook had gone mad.

In the summer of 1908, the whole family returned to England, since his father’s furlough was then due. They travelled by train on the TransSiberian Railway through Russia and Germany to a destination in Sevenoaks, 23 miles south-east of London. This choice was governed by the presence there of Walthamstow Hall, a school for the daughters of missionaries, where William’s three sisters were enrolled. The older two spent most of their schooldays there as boarders whereas Ethel came with her father, mother and William when they returned to China four years later. William’s father spent most of the intervening time travelling in Ireland, as was the custom of missionaries on furlough, propagandising the work of the mission, encouraging others to join it and raising funds for its work.

The family moved to Ireland for some of this time, staying in the seaside town of Warrenpoint some six miles from his grandparents in Newry. This period made a great impression on William and established his unequivocal identification of himself as Irish. During this stay he was taken by his father to Belfast to see the famous Titanic which was near to completion and therefore to her disastrous sinking on 15 April 1912, her maiden voyage.

By the summer of 1912 William had returned to China with his mother and sister Ethel to meet up with his father, who had returned earlier. He was now 7 years old and much more able to appreciate the nature of the journey they were undertaking. He remembers it as the most exciting experience of his childhood. This time they travelled with the cheaper Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line rather than P&O as most British did, to cut costs for the mission. Many of the passengers were German and William remembers a young man of 18 who was bound for Penang to avoid compulsory service in the German Army. The ship sailed round the Bay of Biscay to Genoa and Naples and through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea. He remembers the searchlights in the Suez Canal and the overwhelming heat in the Red Sea, with only slow electric fans to stir the hot air limply. From Penang they sailed to Shanghai, after which they transferred to

Family portrait, Teddy bear given to William by his father for his sixth birthday, 1911. Left to right: Harriet, Anne, Fathe r, William, Mother and Ethel.

a smaller Japanese ship that took them to Dairen, a port in southern Manchuria, where his father was on the quay to meet them.

The reunited family travelled by rail to Kwan-Chung-Tzu, the town where William’s sisters had been born and in which his father worked for most of his life and later died. Its name was later altered to Chang-Chun and then again to Hsin-King. However, this was not the end of their journey since Kwan was not his home at this time and he was living in Kirin, some sixty miles to the east. Kirin is on the great river Sungari but it was not on a railway, so the last part of the journey was by Chinese cart, the traditional method of travel and one habitually used by his father and the other missionaries when ‘itinerating’. A Chinese cart is a miniature covered wagon, with solid wheels and no springs, pulled slowly by a mule. Since the road led through the mountains William has vivid memories of the landscape as he approached his father’s house in Kirin.

The house itself was memorable because, unusually in China, it had two storeys, and also because its amateur architect was another missionary who had forgotten to provide for an internal staircase. One had to be added as an afterthought, which made it a perennial joke. There was access to the roof from the upper floor and William learned from his father to recognise the stellar constellations and the resplendent Venus and Jupiter.

After about a year, the family returned to their house in Kwan-ChungTzu, since William’s father had finished his assignment to Kirin. Kwan was divided into Chinese, Japanese and Russian parts and William’s house was a conventional one-storey house with a big garden, in the Chinese sector. In the summer William and Ethel and the other missionary children would play cricket, rounders and French cricket. In winter, everything was covered in six feet or more of snow and they constructed dugouts in it. This may have been inspired by the Great War because in August 1914 the children were told a war was starting, although it was very unclear who was going to fight whom. In the summer of 1915 William returned to England with his mother and sister. His father accompanied them to Harbin where they picked up the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was, of course, impossible to travel through Germany in 1915. At the frontier they transferred into a Swedish train. The contrast with the dirty Russian train was dramatic. All was clean and comfortable and the food delicious, whereas they had been obtaining food until then on the platforms of the stations from the peasants who brought it there. They travelled through Sweden and Norway to Bergen and then embarked on a ship for Newcastle. There was a very real danger of torpedoes and mines and William remembers a diplomat in their party whose bag was weighted so that it would sink irrecoverably if they were hit. The family then travelled to Chester to stay for a short time with his uncle and aunt, and there they were reunited with William’s two older sisters.

The plan was for the family to make a new home in Edinburgh, and this was where William spent the next fifteen years of his life. Edinburgh was chosen partly because of Isabella’s attachment to Scotland, acquired when she spent part of her adolescence in Arran, but the more compelling reason concerned the medical training of his eldest sister Annie. This was not for the outstanding reputation of the Edinburgh medical school but was based on the fact that in 1915 women medical students were completely segregated from the men in Edinburgh, whereas in Belfast they studied together. Fortunately for Annie, this policy was altered soon after she began her training. William was enrolled at George Watson’s Boys’ College, a very well-known Edinburgh school, and his two other sisters in George Watson’s Ladies’ College. A flat had been secured for them at 37 Warrender Park Road, part of a typical Edinburgh stone-built terrace of houses. Their flat was on the top, fourth, floor. The flat was quite big and provided separate rooms for him, his mother and three sisters. Lighting was by gas, first gas jets then gas mantles. There was no electricity. Heating was by open coal fires and one or two gas fires.

As William’s Chinese clothes were distinctly peculiar he had been taken to a tailor in Chester to be fitted out. One of the items bought on the recommendation of the tailor was a bowler hat. When he wore it in Edinburgh (at the age of 10) it brought him as much ridicule as his Chinese clothes would have and it was regularly knocked off his head. School did not begin immediately on the family’s arrival and they had time to get to know two families from Ulster with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The New Library of Psychoanalysis
• Also in This Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One: Introduction to the papers
• Part Two: Papers A The psychoanalytic theory of sexual development and sexual deviation
• Part Three: Other writings and references
• Full chronological list of writings, published and unpublished, by William H.Gillespie
• References
• Name index
• Subject index