JOURNAL ARTICLES
R.D. Hinshelwood (1990) Virginia Woolf and psycho-analysis (letter), 1991, International Review of Psycho-Analysis 17:367-371.
In the 1920s, a number of the Bloomsbury group of literary intellectuals in London took a special interest in psychoanalysis, including Virginia Woolf’s younger brother Adrian Stephen (and his wife, and Lytton Strachey’s younger brother, James (and his wife). This is a substantial letter engaging with questions about the place of psychoanalysis in Britain from the early days (around 1913-1920).. In particular, given that Virginia Woolf was both emotionally disturbed at times, and was well-acquainted with Freud’s work (she and her husband Leonard Woolf, set up the Hogarth Press, and became Freud’s publisher in England), why did she not avail herself of a psychoanalysis?
R.D. Hinshelwood (1991) Social cybernetics: An Enlightenment contradiction, 1991. Medicine and War 7: 218-221.
A cybernetic model of society describes it as a complex system of feedback mechanisms that occur almost predictably and mechanically. However, this technical approach that is typical of Enlightenment rationalism goes counter to the humanism (and the anti-theology) of the Enlightenment which embodies individual autonomy, agency, and human freedom.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1993) The countryside. Published in British Journal of Psychotherapy 10: 202-210.
This paper presented at a Freud Museum Conference, on Ecological Madness, explored the unconscious relations between human beings and nature with nature, which have changed over the centuries. In Shakespeare’s day the heath was counterpoised as a dangerous place, with the hearth, the safety of the home, the village, and other people. Today, in contrast, the countryside has become an idyllic place for recuperation in the minds of townsfolk. With this reversal nature is now regarded almost triumphantly as the exploitable plaything of human civilisation, suggesting a cultural set of attitudes akin to hypomanic defences.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1995) The myth of the British compromise. Published in French (Le mythe du compromis britannique: réflexions sur les dissensions au sein de la Société Britannique de psychanalyse), Topique 57: 229-240.
This paper was presented at Alain de Mijolla’s invitation to a meeting in Paris of his International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis (AIHP). Thr British Psychoanalytical Society is noted for its capacity for the British talent for compromise, typically because it did not split apart after the Controversial Discussions of 1943-1944, even thought the discussions ended in stalemate. However, the context was important; at the time in the early 1940s the British Society was the only one left in Europe (apart from small societies in Switzerland and Sweden), and in the USA psychoanalysis was in disarray until the Viennese had brushed aside the existing societies there. As a result the possibility that psychoanalysis would disappear altogether was strong and would have promoted a desperate need to carry banner with unity and confidence.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1995) Psycho-analysis in Britain: points of cultural access 1893-1918, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 76: 135-151.
Psychoanalysis was known in Britain from the 1890s amongst a few psychiatrists, but began to flourish after the First World War and because of it. Psychoanalysis was the only discipline which had a workable model for understanding war neurosis (now known as PTSD. The early years of its emerging place in British culture and mental health provision are detailed here. Then, in 1927, cultured persons of the British Psychoanalytical Society, upper middle class, Oxbridge educated, and vaguely anti-semitic took to their hearts a middle European, Jewish woman without a University education, Melanie Klein. It led me to consider how psychoanalysis arrived into British cultural and professional life.
In fact, seven distinct groups seemed to take note in the first 25 years of the century.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1996) Convergences with psycho-analysis. In Ian Parker and Russell Spiers (eds) Psychology and Society (London: Pluto Press) pp. 93-104.
This volume attempted to face the difficult question of the competing claims of social science and psychoanalysis to explain the nature and experiences of human beings. I had for some time thought through the surprising conjunction of Marx’s alienation and Klein’s projective identification. This chapter attempts to consider how these opposite direction could converge – are we formed by society or by our own inner worlds?
R.D. Hinshelwood (1997) The elusive concept of ‘internal objects’ and the origins of the Klein group 1934-1943. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 78: 877-897. Reprinted in Milton, J. (2020) Essential Readings from the Melanie Klein Archives; 184-208. London: Routledge.
The object-relations tradition in Britain developed in contrast to the ego-psychology of Vienna and the USA. After Klein developed her play technique with children and the importance of the dramas of children’s played-out phantasies, she turned to categorising the internal world in terms of objects and relationships. In her archives at the Welcome Library in London, there are a number of sets of notes from around 1940 which address the question of what an ‘internal object’ is. The obscurity of the meaning of the term led to considerable confusion, contradiction and eventually ennui. Following the Controversial Discussions, post-1944, the term become emblematic of Kleinian psychoanalysis and the Klein group.
R.D. Hinshelwood (1998) Organising psychoanalysis in Britain. Psychoanalysis and History 1:97-102.
My strong interest in history and psychoanalysis led me, with Andrea Sabbadini to found a new Journal to be called Psychoanalysis and History; Andrea edited it and I published it (on the strength of my work with the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, and the British Journal of Psychotherapy). In this paper in the first volume, I wrote about the development of those organisations which first sponsored the practice and the teaching of psychoanalytic ideas. I was interested too in certain social factors, such as the numbers of woman entering this new profession in the 1920s.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2005) Melanie Klein and repression: An examination of some unpublished notes of 1934. Psychoanalysis and History 8: 5-42.
After Klein became a training analyst in 1930, and her book on the analysis of children was published in 1932, she began to re-examine clinically the nature of the defences. Another delving into the archives at the Wellcome Library, produced an extraordinary set of notes written by Melanie Klein (titled ‘Early repression mechanism’) which later evolved into her paper, in 1946 on schizoid mechanisms. From details in the clinical material, this document could be dated to early 1934. It was interrupted by her elucidation of the depressive position, probably following the death of her son in April 1934.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2008) Melanie Klein and countertransference: A historical note. Psychoanalysis and History 10: 95-113.
A document in Klein’s archives in the Wellcome Library is a set of notes that she wrote in preparation for an IPA conference in 1953 where she would make a response from the floor to a panel on psychoanalysis and schizophrenia to which Wilfred Bion contributed his first paper as a psychoanalyst. This paper focuses on Klein’s suggestions that the inability to work with psychosis comes from an analyst’s reaction to their countertransference which is the need to keep a distance the psychotic’s especially destructive aggression involved in their attacks on reality.
R.D. Hinshelwood and Craig Fees (2014) Shared responsibility as an attitude of mind (working alongside): A letter by David Wills in the PETT Archives. Therapeutic Communities 36: 186-191.
This paper written jointly with the PETT archivist, Craig Fees, published a letter by David Wills from the archives. He write in 1977 to Robert Laslett about progressive education (a parallel development to the therapeutic community in mental health) and the need to established relationships of shared responsibility in place of the traditional top-down authority of most educational and mental health institutions.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2016) Notes, Melanie Klein Trust website. Autobiography: Melanie Klein. https://melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/resources/melanie-kleins-full-autobiography-transcribed-by-robert-hinshelwood/
From Melanie Klein’s archives there are various autobiographical fragments and notes written late in her life. In 1959, perhaps with Betty Joseph’s encouragement, Klein put those notes together as a continuous autobiographical document though it was never published. It is now available on the Melanie Klein Trust website.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2018) John Rickman behind the scenes: The influence of Lewin’s field theory on practice, countertransference and W.R. Bion International Journal of Psychoanalysis 100: 1409-1423.
John Rickman was Wilfred Bion’s first analyst briefly in 1938-1939. He had a strong interest and experience of social projects before becoming a psychoanalyst in 1923. His interest led him to read a book on Kurt Lewin’s social field theory which he immediately applied to the psychoanalytic setting, a field of two persons. It appeared to fit with the emerging object-relations tradition arising from Klein’s play technique (at the time he was also in a third analysis himself, with Klein). Rickman also discussed these ideas with Bion and they thought together about the social field of a mental hospital which led Bion to his experiment at Northfield Hospital. Field theory has consequently been an underlying model in British Object-Relations psychoanalysis as well as in group therapy.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2018) Northfield for ever. Group Analysis, vol. 51, 4: pp. 434-441.
75 years after Wilfred Bion’s experiment in rehabilitation of groups of soldiers at Northfield Hospital in 1943, the Group Analytic Society arranged a conference about the work there during the wartime. My paper to the panel described the various elements that resulted from Bion’s work including the several Tavistock traditions and the therapeutic community.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
R.D. Hinshelwood (1991) Psychodynamic psychiatry before World War. In German Berrios and Hugh Freeman (eds), 1991, 150 Years of British Psychiatry (London: Gaskell/Royal College of Psychiatrists).
This paper was fairly exhaustively researched as part of my interest in the history of psychoanalysis in Britain, which continued with the 1995 paper, below. There were all kinds of embryonic developments within psychiatry, inspired at the time by a hew hope in treatment effectiveness which was enhanced by the new psychoanalytic ideas, entering the field from the 1890s.
R.D. Hinshelwood (2006) Who wants to be a scientist: The historical and psychoanalytic context at the start of Melanie Klein’s career, 1918-1921. In Jon Mills (ed) Other Banalities: Melanie Klein Revisited Routledge; pp. 8-24.
Melanie Klein had hoped to train as a doctor, but was married off by her family at the age of 21 (1903), and went to live in Budapest.
However, she gained a lot from her academic older brother Emmanuel. Then, after each of her three children she had a depressive episode and eventually consolidated Sandor Ferenczi during the war. By 1917 she became interested in psychoanalysis encouraged by Ferenczi to make observation on children. This was an important phase in the history of psychoanalysis itself which is described in the chapter. Despite the obstruction to her fuller education, it also freed to expand in different ways from the predominant culture of medical science which prevailed in psychoanalysis in the 1920s; and indeed to feel a freedom to question aspects of classical psychoanalysis.