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Bloomsbury
and Psychoanalysis
An Exhibition of Documents from the
Archives of the British Psychoanalytical
Society
Compiled by Polly Rossdale and
Ken Robinson
Grateful thanks to Pearl King, Lynda Etan and
Joe Robinson
Please note: All material on website
is subject to copyright.
All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any
form or medium without express written permission is
prohibited. We are grateful to the trustees of the
Melanie Klein Trust for giving us permission to include
documents.
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The
Bloomsbury Group
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In the years
immediately preceding the First
World War, two
intellectual movements
coincided and showed
remarkable mutual
interest. Many of the artists and
writers who
gathered under the broad umbrella of
the
Bloomsbury Group were fascinated by a
new
science that was seeping across the
Channel
from Europe. In particular, they were drawn
by
the writing of Sigmund Freud. In 1913,
Brill’s
translation of Interpretation of Dreams
appeared
and The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
appeared the following year. Leonard
Woolf
wrote a review of the latter for the New
English
Weekly and Lytton Strachey wrote a
then
unpublished piece on Freud. Ernest
Jones’s
Papers on Psychoanalysis, published in
1912,
were also influential (for James Strachey
and
Joan Rivière, for example). And in 1913,
he
founded the London Psychoanalytical
Society.
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In
the years following the war the interest in
psychoanalysis
grew. Jones dissolved the now defunct London Society and
founded the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1919. In
key figures from the Bloomsbury Group, psychoanalysis
found not only analysts who could also teach others but
translators who would play a vital role in the wider
transmission of psychoanalysis.
The
two families at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group, the
Strachey and the Stephen families, both played
significant roles in the development of psychoanalysis
in Britain and beyond. But there were other more minor
figures, like Sebastian Sprott, or figures on the edge
of the Group, like Joan Rivière, who also played their
part (in Rivière’s case an important one).
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1.
Lytton Strachey having his hair cut at
Asheham
1913:
Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant,
Lytton
Strachey, Saxon Sydney Turner,
Vanessa
Stephen
2.
Dora Carrington, Stephen Tomlin, Lytton
Strachey,
Sebastian Sprott
3.
HTJ Norton, Clive Bell, Mary Hutchinson and
Sir
John Hutchinson; (front) James Strachey,
Duncan
Grant
4.
Vanessa Stephen, Virginia Stephen and their
stepsister
Stella Duckworth
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5.
Virginia Woolf
6.
Duncan Grant, Adrian Stephen
7.Letter
from Martin James to James Strachey, 11 December 1963,
congratulating him on becoming an Honorary Member of the
British Psychoanalytical Society and commenting on his
speech at the Jubilee dinner held in 1963 to mark the
50th anniversary of the formation of the Society.
James
jokes that as a young man fresh to psychoanalysis he
thought Bloomsbury was Britain. (CSF/F09/28)
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Following
the death of their father, Sir Leslie
Stephen,
in 1905 Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian
and
Thoby moved into 46 Gordon Square.
This
was to be the nucleus of what would
become
known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Thursday
evenings became a regular fixture for
friends
that included Clive Bell (who proposed
to
Vanessa the following year), George Bernard
Shaw,
John Maynard Keynes, Saxon Sydney
Turner,
Dora Carrington, EM Forster and
Sebastian
Sprott. (Sprott trained as a clinical
psychologist
at Cambridge and later translated
Freud’s
New Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-analysis.
He
was also a lover of John
Maynard
Keynes). |
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Many
of these men, Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton and James
Strachey, Clive Bell and Saxon Sydney-Turner, had become
friends through membership of the Apostles, a secret
society at Cambridge. It was Lytton Strachey who
encouraged his old friend Leonard Woolf to court
Virginia Stephen. The subjects ranged over by the
Bloomsbury Group were broad but psychoanalysis was an
exciting and recurring theme around this time. By 1920,
Ernest Jones notes in passing in a letter to Otto Rank
that ‘Psa is mentioned in nearly every modern novel in
England’. As psychoanalysts the Stephens and Stracheys
maintained their contact with their families and their
Bloomsbury friends.
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The
Stephens:
Adrian (1889-1948)
and
Karin (1889-1953)
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In Adrian Stephen, Bloomsbury and
psychoanalysis met. He was born in 1883 into
an
erudite and cultured background, the brother of Virginia
Woolf and Vanessa Bell. As a student at Cambridge his
sense of mischief and fun manifested itself in what
became known as the Zanzibar Hoax. The Sultan of
Zanzibar was visiting England and Adrian and his friends
decided to dress up and impersonate the Sultan’s uncle
(fearing that if they impersonated the Sultan himself
they would be recognised and exposed).
They
travelled to London, equipped themselves at a theatrical
costumiers, sent a telegram to the Mayor of Cambridge
informing him of the Sultan’s uncle’s imminent arrival.
On returning to Cambridge, the hoaxers were escorted
around the town and principal colleges on a grand
tour.
The story was later leaked to The Daily Mail
but they had got away with it.
They did not lose
their taste for practical jokes. A few years later
Adrian encouraged his sister Virginia and Duncan Grant
to take part in another similar exploit, this time
dressing up as the Emperor of Abyssina and his retinue.
They informed the admiralty that the Emperor wished to
visit the Channel Fleet of the British Navy and its flag
ship the ‘Dreadnought’. They were received with the
dignity and ceremony appropriate to their apparent
standing. They talked in a mixture of Swahili and an
invented language and Adrian acted as the group’s
interpreter. Again their hoax was later revealed but the
Navy were keen to keep scandal under wraps. It was not
until much later when he was well established as an
analyst that Adrian wrote up their exploits as The
Dreadnought Hoax which was published in 1936 by
Hogarth Press.
In 1907, Adrian was called to the bar
at
Lincoln’s Inn and, in 1914, he married
Karin
Costelloe, a fellow of Newnham
College,
Cambridge, a niece by marriage and pupil
of
Bertrand Russell. She was the most gifted woman
philosophy student in Cambridge of her time.
In 1912, she had been elected to the
Aristotelian Society and published a book on Bergson.
When war broke out both Adrian and Karin (like Lytton
and James Strachey and Leonard Woolf) became
conscientious objectors. Amongst the manuscripts of the
Stephens in the possession of the Archives there is one
written by Karin ‘On Pacificism’. They spent the First
World War working on a farm in Essex.
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It was after the war
that they both became
interested in training as
psychoanalysts. In the inter-war period Ernest Jones was
eager that those interested in psychoanalysis should
have medical qualifications, and they duly trained as
doctors. They both went into analysis with James Glover,
until his untimely death in 1925 when Adrian went to
Ella Sharpe and Karin to Sylvia Payne. They were
accepted as Associate Members in 1927 and became full
members in 1930/1.
During the Second World War,
Adrian was
so angered by the anti-semitism that had
pushed the Freuds and many others out of their homes
that he abandoned his pacifist stance and joined the
Royal Army Medical Corps as an army psychiatrist.
Amongst the Stephen manuscripts is a paper by Adrian
entitled simply ‘Anti-Semitism’. John Bowlby has left a
memorable pen-picture of Adrian in this period. In May
1942, he was posted to the military hospital at
Northfield, Birmingham where Rickman and Bion were
working. Karin joined up as a driver in the Queen’s
Messenger Flying Squad Food Convoy. During and after the
war, Adrian drew on his legal training to take a lead in
the constitutional reform of the British
Society.
Karin suffered from manic-depression and
from increasingly-severe deafness. Leonard Woolf tried
to her help her through a particularly low period in the
1940s by encouraging her to write a biography of Freud.
She finally committed suicide.
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8.
Adrian Stephen as a boy in sailor uniform
9.
Karin Stephen dressed as a Quaker. Karin
like
Adrian loved fancy dress but she also
had
Quaker origins
10.
The Zanzibar Hoax
11.
The Dreadnought Hoax
12.
Daily Mirror cartoon showing the
Dreadnought
Hoax
13.
Karin Stephen, Adrian Stephen and their
daughter
Anne, Chilling, 1919
14.
Adrian and Karin Stephen and Virginia
Woolf
15.
Adrian Stephen with pigs in Loom Lane
during
his service as a conscientious
objector
in 1917
16.
King’s Head which Karin first rented in
1924
and bought in 1932. It stands on
the
Handford Water near Harwich on the
Essex
coast
17.
Adrian Stephen in military uniform
18.
An excerpt from Karin Stephen’s 1927 diary
recording
her life on return home from a trip
to
the USA. (KS/03)
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19.
Letter from Adrian Stephen to Sylvia Payne, 21 January
1937, proposing an item for the British Psychoanalytical
Society board-meeting agenda: ‘To consider the
principles
guiding
the training committee in their
selection
of candidates with special
reference
to the need or otherwise of
requiring
medical qualification’.
(G01/BB/F01/02C)
20.
Letters from Adrian and Karin Stephen to
Edward
Glover, 9 June 1939, setting out
their
qualifications and experience for
practice
in the emergency of war.
(CSB/F16/01
and 02)
21.
Letter from Adrian Stephen to Sylvia Payne, 6 July 1939,
about a proposal that the rules of the British
Psychoanalytical Society be made public to members.
(CSB/F16/03)
22.
Extract from John Bowlby’s 1985 typescript ‘Memories of
BPAS Analysts’, giving his penportraits of the Stephens.
(CBC/F09/06)
23.
Psychoanalytic papers by the Stephens
‘They
were … "Bloomsbury", a badge they wore with a pride
equal to that with which they called themselves
psychoanalysts.’
[Perry
Meisel and Walter Kendrick in The letters
of
James and Alix Strachey 1924-25, (1986)].
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The
Stracheys:
James (1887-1967)
and
Alix (1892-1973)
24 James
Strachey
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After
graduation from Cambridge, Alix Sargant-
Florence
moved with her brother to Bloomsbury
and
here became familiar with the group that
would
define her social world. James Strachey
and
Alix had known each other since 1910
but
it was meeting through Bloomsbury that
consolidated
their relationship. They married
in
1920 and that year went, through Jones,
to
Vienna to meet and be analysed by Freud.
Freud
had already admired the work of James’
brother,
Lytton, and was keen for James to begin translation and
spread psychoanalysis in
England.
‘In the Stracheys … Freud found the
precise
embodiment of what England, his
favourite
country, meant to him.’ (ibid.)
James
came to psychoanalysis through his
interest
in the Society for Psychical Research.
It seems
that at some point during the war Ernest Jones had
advised him that, if interested in pursuing a career in
psychoanalysis, he should undergo medical training but
he gave up
medical
school after only three weeks. James
became
an Associate Member of the British
Society
in February 1922. When Alix went to
Berlin
to begin an analysis under Karl Abraham
in
1924, James stayed in London living with,
amongst
others, Adrian Stephen.
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James
Strachey was an influential teacher
and
analyst. His paper, ‘The Nature of the
Therapeutic
Action of Psychoanalysis’ (1934),
has
become a classic. But he became
increasingly
engaged in the translation of Freud.
He
and Alix took on the task of translating the
material
for the third volume of Freud’s Collected
Papers
and
he himself was responsible for the fifth and final
volume. After Freud’s death in 1939, he accepted with
Alix’s assistance the challenge of preparing the
standard edition of Freud’s psychological writings in
English, withdrawing eventually from analytic
work.
He
and Alix were in demand as translators and
commentators.
Ernst Freud asked them, for
example,
whether they would undertake to
translate
Freud’s neurological writings. The
significance
of Strachey’s work on the standard
edition
is all the greater because after the
emigration
of analysts from Berlin and Vienna
under
Nazi persecution English became the
dominant
international language for
psychoanalysis.
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25.
Wilfred Bion, as President of the British
Psychoanalytical
Society presenting book
to James Strachey at a dinner in
1966 to
celebrate
the completion of Standard
Edition. The photograph shows
Donald
Winnicott, Anna Freud, Bion, and
James
Strachey.
Leonard Woolf as well as Anna
Freud and Wilfred Bion spoke
at the dinner.
26.
Photograph of the dinner held to celebrate
the
50th Jubilee of the formation of the British
Psychoanalytical
Society, at which James
Strachey
spoke. (Both Stracheys appear on
the
photograph.)
27.
Alix Strachey
28.
Letter from Maynard Keynes at 46 Gordon
Square
to James Strachey, his neighbour at
number
41, 12 July 1929, remarking that
Ernest
Jones's ‘forecast written in 1916, as
to
the troubles in which the passion to return
to
gold would involve this country must be
reckoned
one of the triumphs of psychoanalysis’.
(CSD/F03/06)
By
permission of the Provost and Scholars of King's College,
Cambridge.
29.
Letter from James Strachey to Ernest Jones,
18
January 1956, mentioning editing letters
between
Virginia Woolf and Lytton
Strachey.
(CSD/F04/56)
30.
Letter from Ernst Freud to James Strachey,
6
March 1959, agreeing to the inclusion
of
a letter by Lytton Strachey in the German
selection
of Freud’s letters. The letter did not
appear
in the English selection.
(CSF/F01/21)
31.
Letter from James Strachey to Ernest Jones,
18
July 1945, setting out amongst other
things
how he came to be interested in
psychoanalysis.
(CSD/F03/08)
32.
Letter from Ignacio Matte Blanco to James
Strachey,
29 November 1963, paying
tribute
to Strachey’s teaching as he
remembered
it from 1936-37.
(CSF/F09/26)
 
33.
Letter from Donald Winnicott to Alix
Strachey,
26 April 1967, recording his
indebtedness
to James Strachey ‘for his
classical
analysis of me – a quite ill person’.
(CSH/F02/08)
x
34.
Letter from Ernest Jones to James Strachey,
28
September 1939. Jones missed
Strachey
at Freud’s funeral and sets out plans
for
various memorials to Freud, including an
English
translation of the complete works.
(CSD/F03/70)
x
35.
Letter from Ernest Jones to James Strachey,
19
October 1939, giving details of the
committee
appointed to consider the
possibility
of an English translation of the
complete
works. The committee would
consist
of Anna Freud, Sylvia Payne, Joan
Rivière,
James Strachey, John Rickman and
Jones
himself. (CSD/F03/71)
36.
Letter from Ruth Usher, as Honorary Business
Secretary
of the Institute of Psychoanalysis,
18
February 1948, to James Strachey
agreeing
remuneration for his ‘expenses in
connection
with the proposed publication of
Freud’s
Collected Works’.
(CSF/F07/16)
37.
Letter from Ernest Jones to James Strachey
and
Joan Rivière, 9 March 1940, setting
our
progress on the possible English
translation
of Freud’s complete works.
(G10/BG/F02/41)
38.
Letter from James Strachey to Ernest Jones,
25
September 1952, showing him at work
on
the Rat Man case for the Standard
Edition.
(CSD/F03/64)
 
39.
Letter from James Strachey to Ernest Jones,
25
August 1955, illustrating how Strachey’s
work
on the Standard Edition and Jones’s
work
on the biography were intertwined.
Strachey
relies on Jones’s work to produce
his
editorial notes to each opus.
(CSD/F04/49)
x
40.
Letter from James Strachey to Ernest Jones,
7
September 1953, voicing Strachey’s
annoyance
at a ‘sickening’ TLS review. He
has
‘recently had a newly invented and
rather
more severe operation’ on his eye.
(CSD/F04/05)
41.
Letter from James Strachey to Joan Rivière,
16
January 1962, showing how much
Strachey’s
relations with Hogarth Press
had
deteriorated since Leonard Woolf’s
retirement.
(CRC/F02/18)
 
42.
Letters from Wilfred Bion to James Strachey,
30
May and 10 November 1963, asking
him
to make a speech at the Jubilee dinner
and
thanking him for speaking.
(CSF/F09/05
and 23)
 
43.
James Strachey’s speech at the 1963 Jubilee
dinner,
taken from the booklet published by
the
Society for the 50th Anniversary in
1963.
44.
Letter from John Klauber to James Strachey,
6
December 1963, confirming that he has
been
elected an Honorary Member of the
British
Psychoanalytical Society in
recognition
of his outstanding service as a
teacher,
writer, translator and editor of the
Standard
Edition. (CSF/F09/27)
x
45.
Letter from Roger Money-Kyrle to Dorothy
Fanshawe,
5 April 1936, recommending
Alix
Strachey as a ‘first class analyst’.
(CMC/F01/10)
x
46.
Letter from Hanna Fenichel to James
Strachey,
16 May 1951, thanking him and
setting
out their agreement that the Stracheys
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