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Self Psychology in Australia Today:
A Snapshot
S. Giac Giacomantonio
Self psychology in Australia enjoys the same diversity and
multiplicity of identity as it does in the United States. Not only are
there representatives of each of the major sub-theories of self
psychology, but there is even something of an analogous, geographical
stratification of approaches.
In the U.S., self psychology was born in the heart of the
psychoanalytic movement, though claims to the proper understanding of
self psychology seem today to be made both by those who see it as
psychoanalysis proper, and those who are as proud to be outside of
orthodox psychoanalysis as they are to be self-psychologists. In
Australia, self psychology seems not to have found a bona fide place in
the curriculum of any institute affiliated with the International
Psychoanalytical Association. Instead, self-psychological ideas have
been disseminated mostly through other psychotherapy training
programmes, with few individuals in the psychoanalytic establishments
incorporating it in their supervision/training analyses etc.
I interviewed a number of people for this article, each of whom would
be easily identified in Australia as having strong ties to self
psychology. I present them organised by geography. This brief article
cannot supply an exhaustive list of those of self-psychological
influence in Australia, and it must be pointed out that
inclusion/exclusion was to some degree an exercise in 'convenience
sampling'.
SYDNEY
Russell Meares has devoted his professional career to furthering our
understanding of treating the more severely disturbed patient. He
trained as a psychiatrist in London, and cites as two of his greatest,
initial influences, the work of his father, Ainslie Meares, and his
close colleague Robert Hobson, both of whom had been devoted to studying
new possibilities in the treatment of intractable psychopathology.
Meares has been identified with Hobson as co-author of the
"Conversational Model." For readers unfamiliar with the Conversational
Model, Meares describes it by saying that the patient "presents in a
form of conversation that is a manifestation of his or her current kind
of consciousness. A form of consciousness is the resultant of a
particular interplay of the brain with the environment. This interplay
is mediated, in terms of the social environment, by conversation. The
therapeutic aim is to develop a particular kind of conversation with the
patient that is necessary to the brain-state that underpins the
emergence of that larger and more coherent form of consciousness William
James called self."
After moving to Australia in 1969, Meares was appointed to a chair in
Sydney at Westmead Hospital in 1981, and began a Masters programme for
training psychiatric candidates in psychotherapy, a programme that
continues to this day. At about this time he met Robert Gordon who was
another key figure in the introduction of self psychology to Australia
(see below), and they and a number of others established a faculty to
develop and teach a psychology of the self that would integrate the
various traditions of the respective backgrounds of its members. These
included self psychology (Craig Powell), middle group psychoanalysis,
Sullivanian perspectives, and the Conversational Model. This psychology
of the self included, but was not exclusively like, the psychoanalytic
one developed by Kohut and his colleagues.
From 1983, Meares led the establishment of annual meetings in Sydney
and, over the next 12 years, many of those in the U.S. who were central to
the developing world of self psychology (including Brandchaft, Stolorow,
the Ornsteins, Goldberg, Bacal, Strozier and Lichtenberg, among others)
were brought to Australia. The impact of these visiting speakers on the
developing scene in Australia is difficult to overestimate, and was
emphasised by many of those interviewed for the present article.
In 1989, the Master of Medicine programme at Westmead Hospital was
replicated in a parallel programme that permitted non-medical candidates
to take the same psychotherapeutic training afforded to registrars. The
Australia and New Zealand Association for Psychotherapy (ANZAP) was
born, with Meares as the foundation president. With requests from a
number of other cities across Australia and New Zealand, ANZAP was to
offer training in Perth, Melbourne, Canberra, Christchurch, and
Townsville, demanding much of the training staff who often travelled
regularly to these other centres for supervision.
Today, the ANZAP group continues its tradition of training and
rigorous research into the treatment of the more fragile patient.
Alongside its training in the Conversational Model, ANZAP continues to
be one of the most important institutes in the country for the training
of self psychology theory, and both Meares and former ANZAP President,
Tessa Philips were appointed to the International Council of
Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.
Meares has recently received a (much coveted) NHMRC grant to study
linguistically the conversations of psychotherapeutic treatment, and has
established a new laboratory for the neurobiological study of
unconscious emotional processing in subjective states of trauma.
Robert Gordon is a psychiatrist in Sydney who had been attending
regularly the self psychology conferences in the U.S., after being first
inspired by the introductory article of Wolf and Kohut, published in
1978 in the International Journal. Gordon felt that he had
finally found a theory that would contribute more than any other to his
being able to "understand human beings"; though for Gordon, self
psychology might be better thought of as a 'process', than a 'theory'.
Since his initial contact with self psychology, it has remained a
central theme in his writing. In his own work, he recognises the input
of the many perspectives from the contemporary field today, with
influences from dynamic systems theory, affect theory, the work of
Mitchell, and a special place for the theory of intersubjectivity.
When he met Meares for the first time, Gordon had sensed that Meares'
original work was investigating lines similar to those of some self
psychologists in the U.S.; they began working together. Gordon was Head of
the Department of Psychotherapy when the Masters Programme commenced at
Westmead Hospital, and continued to be involved in the training
programmes for many years. He described these years with a fondness and
affection for his colleagues, and with a sense of admiration for the
high standards of teaching and practice attained in the training
programme.
Suffering from compromised health, Gordon resigned from ANZAP in
1993. A year later he and his then-wife Kerry Egan founded the Institute
for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP), which offered a programme based
heavily on self psychology. The ICP continued to train successive
cohorts, including a number of students in Canberra, before dissolving
in 2002 after the dissolution of the marriage between Gordon and Egan.
Gordon then taught at the Australian College of Psychotherapists (the
member organisation of the ICP) for a year, but since then, although
continuing to supervise, he has focused mainly on his clinical practice.
Craig Powell is a psychoanalyst affiliated with the Sydney Institute
of Psychoanalysis, and the New South Wales Institute of Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy. He is singular amongst those interviewed for the present
article inasmuch as he is the only psychoanalyst mentioned with
connections both to self psychology and to the Australian
Psychoanalytical Association. Self psychology might still be thought of
as an 'adjunct' theory in the curricula of the psychoanalytic training
programmes in Australia, most of which programmes were heavily Kleinian
when Powell immigrated after his psychoanalytic training at the Toronto
Institute of Psychoanalysis. (Powell remembered with amusement how a
colleague at the institute in Sydney confessed that Kohut had for many
years been thought of as 'the devil'.) A self-psychological viewpoint is
available to psychoanalytic candidates only if they happen to encounter
one of a few teachers (either as supervisor, or leader of case
conferences, etc., ) of which Powell is one.
Powell laments the ongoing lack of cooperation and harmony in Sydney
between the psychoanalytic society and the individuals and institutes
otherwise mentioned herein, having been himself one of the few bridges
between them. His own training experiences spanned the worlds of Object
Relations and self psychology, as did his training analysis with Howard
Bacal, and his own work reflects this integration.
MELBOURNE
Ronald Lee was first alerted to the work of Heinz Kohut in 1971, when
he was professor of pastoral counselling at Northwestern University. A
colleague had recommended him to read the new title, The Analysis of
the Self, with the endorsement that it would change his life. Lee
devoted a two-week vacation to reading the book, and says that it was
only his stubbornness that helped him endure an initial reaction of
utter confusion, such that he might arrive finally at an understanding
he still describes as "thrilling". Lee began to pursue these new ideas
by attending presentations at the Chicago Institute, and during the
1980s he attended the lectures at Cape Cod over a number of years. At
these lectures he was exposed to a variety of developments of Kohut's
work, most of which are represented today by the pluralism we see at our
annual conferences.
In 1994, Lee returned to his native Australia, to live in Melbourne.
Here he established a private practice, "Empathink", with a life-long
friend and colleague, Brian James. He was dissatisfied with the options
for psychotherapeutic training in Melbourne at the time, because many
were not open to including self psychology, while those that were, had
strayed from the tripartite emphasis on personal treatment, supervision,
and didactic training. Empathink continues to offer these three pillars
from a contemporary, self-psychological perspective, in a city with a
strong tradition of biologically based, psychiatric treatment. Today,
Lee also lectures in self psychology at the University of Melbourne's
Department of Psychiatry.
For Lee, the tenets of self psychology lead inevitably to a clean
break from psychoanalysis, which he feels cannot adequately contain the
innovation of Kohut's work. He feels that the many theoretical
perspectives we see today can be meaningfully linked or united by
tracing their conceptual origins to a small number of postulates of
Kohut - Postulates of Kohut being the subject and title of a new
book he is currently writing. Lee regularly holds an annual Self
Psychology Summer School in various cities in Australia, in which there
is an emphasis placed on both learning classical self-psychological
theory and exploring new, original contributions.
CANBERRA
In Canberra, a group of psychologists operates the local branch of
the Australian Psychological Society's Psychoanalytic Interest Group,
with a heavy focus on self psychology. Malise Arnstein, Sandra Kay
Lauffenburger, and Carol Clark have organised a regular seminar series
over the last three years, and have begun to collect a small library of
books on psychotherapy and self psychology. Although they do not operate
a training programme per se, they offer self-psychological
treatment and supervision. Institutes in Sydney have offered the
Canberra arm of their training programme with the assistance of this
group.
The group began in 1997, when Bruce Stevens and Margaret Groube
approached Arnstein to bring Robert Gordon and Kerry Egan (from the then
'Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy' [ICP]) to Canberra to give an
introductory workshop. This soon led to a number of people taking
training in Canberra from the ICP, and the beginnings of the group were
born. Some of the influences still evident in the group today include
the work of Kohut, Ron Lee, Nancy McWilliams, Fonagy, Brandchaft, and an
emphasis on neuro-psychoanalysis.
BRISBANE
The Brisbane Psychoanalytic Self Psychology Group was founded by Giac
Giacomantonio and Tony Wild, two psychoanalytic therapists interested in
self psychology, and working in a town that self psychology had not yet
touched. Wild and Giac. discovered their common interest by chance,
while working as psychiatrist and psychologist (respectively) on the
same case. They found that they had both gone outside of Brisbane to
find mentors in self psychology, Wild with Ronald Lee and Giac. with
Ernest Wolf and Arnold Goldberg. In addition to establishing the
Brisbane Group, Wild and Giac. have sought to promote self psychology
through their lecturing and supervisory work in the post-graduate
training programmes of psychology and psychiatry candidates.
The Brisbane Group (with a subscription list of some 80 members) is
currently devoted to bi-monthly literature readings and discussions,
with additional presentations by invited psychoanalysts from time to
time. The Group makes psychoanalytic texts available to members, and has
donated a number of otherwise absent titles to the local Universities.
No formal treatment or supervision is offered under the appellation of
the Group, though Wild and Giac. offer privately both self-psychological
treatment and consultation. Not having a formal teaching programme per
se, the Brisbane Group cannot be said to have a unified opinion or
official, 'sub-theoretical' allegiance, though a number in the Group
could be said to be "classical" self psychologists, believing (for
example) that theories like intersubjectivity and the Relational
perspective lie outside the boundaries of psychoanalysis, for
philosophical and conceptual reasons. Instead, the Group maintains a
healthy diversity of opinions, with disagreement and debate marking the
discussions of every meeting.
In Australia, psychoanalytic approaches to mental health treatment
seem to have grown in popularity both in the academy, and in the private
practice of psychotherapy. Accordingly, self psychology has grown in
popularity amongst professionals and students in the mental health
disciplines. Across the space of a couple of decades, a relatively small
number of scholars brought the self-psychological approach from the
U.S.. These teachings were as diverse and numerous as the individuals in
question. Some were more original than others. Some were more
traditional than others. But each of them has transmitted to a new
generation the excitement and enthusiasm that seems always to be found
in communities of self psychologists. And they all have left a legacy of
inquiry, interest in dialogue, and the persistent quest for better
understanding.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Malise Arnstein, Robert Gordon, Ronald Lee, Russell
Meares, Craig Powell, and Tony Wild for their time in granting me
interviews in one or another medium.
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