Iāve realized more and more as time went on what a tremendous lot Iāve lost from not properly correlating my work with the work of others. Itās not only annoying to other people but itās also rude and it has meant that what Iāve said has been isolated and people have to do a lot of work to get at it. It happens to be my temperament, and itās a big fault.
Let me interrupt myself for a moment, to say that I made some notes. These notes are a little bit along the lines of what Iām going to say. Theyāre not even properly corrected, let alone having vital significance for hanging on walls; but I thought that if you had a pencil you might feel like writing down Hartmann3 and Hoffer,4 you know, in the corner at the edge. At the right-hand edge I left room for you to write all sorts of names in so that you can help me, because Iām now getting to the stage where I really would like to be more correlated.
The other side of the thing is that, with me just as with other people, the development of thought has been along the line of something that has to do with growth, and if I happen to be like somebody else, it just turns up because weāre all dealing with the same material. In fact, the series of papers which have meant anything to me have been a continuation of something that happened in my long ten-year analysis with Mr Strachey5 in which I had a series of dreams. I donāt remember any of them, but the point is that I knew that other people had written on this same subject. I also knew that these dreams were different from the others. They were not for analysis; they were consolidations of work done. And I always said that if Iād started at the beginning Iād have written down these dreams so as to collect them one day, but I never did of course. If you started doing this, youād never dream them. So then after the end of analysis, these things take the form of papers we feel we must write and the amazing thing is that people can be found to listen. Iām really tracing a sort of compulsion; and if only I could do it well it would be a wonderful opportunity.
At the beginning I do know that ā like everybody, I suppose, in this room ā as soon as I found Freud and the method that he gave us for investigating and for treatment, I was in line with it. This was just like when I was at school and was reading Darwin and suddenly I knew that Darwin was my cup of tea. I felt this tremendously, and I suppose that if thereās anything I do that isnāt Freudian, this is what I want to know. I donāt mind if it isnāt, but I just feel that Freud gave us this method which we can use, and it doesnāt matter what it, leads us to. The point is, it does lead us to things; itās an objective way of looking at things and itās for people who can go to something without preconceived notions, which, in a sense, is science.
At the beginning there was myself learning to do analysis as a paediatrician having had a tremendous experience of listening to people talking about babies and children of all ages and having had great difficulty in seeing a baby as human at all. It was only through analysis that I became gradually able to see a baby as a human being. This was really the chief result of my first five years of analysis, so that Iāve been extremely sympathetic with any paediatricians or anybody who canāt see babies as human, because I absolutely couldnāt, however I used to try. So this thing happened and then I became very interested in it all.
When I came to try and learn what there was to be learned about psycho-analysis, I found that in those days we were being taught about everything in terms of the 2, 3 and 4 year-old Oedipus complex and regression from it. It was very distressing to me as someone who had been looking at babies ā at mothers and babies ā for a long time (already ten to fifteen years) to find that this was so, because I knew that Iād watched a lot of babies start off ill and a lot of them become ill early. For instance, Iāve had a lot of experience like the one I had this week of two very intelligent and normal parents who brought to me the problem of their little baby of 22 months. This baby, at the age of 16 months, had developed a very well organized obsessional neurosis. The parents said, āWell, what do we do?ā and I was able to take the psychoanalytic theory and say to them, āDo this.ā And they did it and the child dropped the obsessional organization and went forward. It was an absolutely direct application. It seems to me that to have said this now is just simply ordinary experience, but saying it in 1935 in this country would have met with the objection, āBut it canāt happen.ā There wasnāt an audience for that, because of the fact that to have an obsessional neurosis one would have had a regression from difficulties at the Oedipal stage at 3. I know that I overdo this point, but it was something that gave me a line. I thought to myself, Iām going to show that infants are ill very early, and if the theory doesnāt fit it, itās just got to adjust itself. So that was that.
Now, there were people talking about these things before I came on the scene. Iām abysmally ignorant of what Miss Freud was doing until she came to this country. After then Iām able to catch up because she herself grew and I watched her growing through the experiences in the War Nurseries6 and she changed, I think, tremendously. She found in a practical job which people were doing and which she was supervising that things were happening which really influenced her, and it was a great pleasure to watch her. I think that she made a terrific contribution, but I didnāt know at the time the work that she was doing before this. I also know that Alice Balint7 was interested in the things that Iām talking about. There were other people who werenāt analysts who were talking about these things: there was Suttie8, and Margaret Lowenfeld9 who had a tremendous experience of teaching from the very early twenties about mothers and babies; and Merrill Middlemore10 too.
Now, as regards the psycho-neuroses, I felt that Freudās theory and his developing scheme for things, as far as I could gradually come to learn them, covered the subject; and as far as I know I made no contribution at all in that area. As you know, I came very much in 1930 ā 1940 into the learning area of Mrs Klein, and she took the trouble to try to help me with cases and tell me about her own work. I took over from her, without always understanding the patterning, a very great deal which I think was original from ...
