Early British Psychoanalysis and the Medico-Psychological Clinic

Abstract

This article explores the evolution of psychoanalytic therapy in Britain in the years immediately before and during the First World War. Specifically, I look 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, founded by Jessie Murray and Julia Turner, and open between 1913 and 1922. The Clinic developed the first psychoanalytic training program in Britain, as well as offering psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy to a range of patients, including shell-shocked soldiers. Although it has now been virtually forgotten, some of the leading lights of the early British Psycho-Analytical Society, 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. The wide range of personalities and backgrounds of 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, which amounted 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.