Early British Psychoanalysis and the Medico-Psychological Clinic

In 1972 Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus that 'the history of the [psychoanalytic] movement has never even been sketched out'.¹ Of course, a considerable amount of work has been done since then, but their observation remains largely true of the very early days of psychoanalytic therapy in Britain. Histories of psychoanalysis usually rely on Ernest Jones's own account of his pioneering work in establishing the London Psycho-Analyti-cal Society in 1913.² My aim in this article is to explore the evolution of psychoanalytic therapy in Britain in the years immediately before and during the First World War. Specifically, I shall be looking at an institution that developed alongside the London Psycho-Analytical Society in those heady and controversial early days: the Medico-Psychological Clinic, also known as the Brunswick Square Clinic, which was open between 1913 and 1922, and developed the first psychoanalytic training programme in Britain, as well as offering psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy to a range of patients, including shell-shocked soldiers.³

Nowadays the Clinic is almost forgotten: Ernest Jones, in his zeal to establish his own primacy as father of the British movement, fails to mention it in his published reminiscences, even though some of the leading lights of the British Psycho-Analytical Society under his presidency, including James Glover, Sylvia Payne, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Mary Chadwick, Nina Searl, Susan Isaacs, Iseult Grant-Duff and Marjorie Brierley, received their first analysis or training there. One of the results of this suppression has been that we have lost sight of some of the maverick forms in which psychoanalysis originally evolved in Britain. This paper is an effort to recover the experimental verve of the different versions of psychoanalytic therapy circulating in consulting rooms, mental hospitals, and even private apartments before the war, and to explore the role played by the Medico-Psychological Clinic in the establishment of psychoanalytic treatment in Britain. The wide range of personalities and backgrounds that characterized the personnel at the clinic, and the variety of psychotherapeutic treatments available there, were typical of the various and evolving methods of the 'talking cure' available in Britain in those early years, amounting to something like an eclectic indigenous style which was gradually repressed and delimited as more and more early practitioners were converted to—or coerced into—a strict Freudianism conceived along continental European lines. In 1914 Freud himself paid tribute to what he saw as the peculiar aptitude of the English character for psychoanalysis, noting that although: