‘Speaking Kleinian’: Susan Isaacs as Ursula Wise and the Inter-War Popularisation of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

How did the complex concepts of psychoanalysis become popular in early twentieth-century Britain? This article examines the contribution of educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs (1885Isaacs ( -1948 to this process, as well as her role as a female expert in the intellectual and medical history of this period. Isaacs was one of the most influential British psychologists of the inter-war era, yet historical research on her work is still limited. The article focuses on her writing as 'Ursula Wise', answering the questions of parents and nursery nurses in the popular journal Nursery World, from 1929 to 1936. Researched in depth for the first time, Isaacs' important magazine columns reveal that her writing was instrumental in disseminating the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in Britain. Moreover, Isaacs' powerful rebuttals to behaviourist, disciplinarian parenting methods helped shift the focus of caregivers to the child's perspective, encouraging them to acknowledge children as independent subjects and future democratic citizens. Like other early psychoanalysts, Isaacs was not an elitist; she was in fact committed to disseminating her ideas as broadly as possible. Isaacs taught British parents and child caregivers to 'speak Kleinian', translating Klein's intellectual ideas into ordinary language and thus enabling their swift integration into popular discourse.

Brains and psyches: Child psychological and psychiatric expertise in a Swedish newspaper, 1980–2008

“…Second, the psychodynamic mode's enactment of children's mental health encompassed a quite limited set of entities. In contrast to some earlier forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theory prominent during the 1940s and '50s (Shapira, 2013(Shapira, , 2017Zetterqvist Nelson and Sandin, 2013), the psychodynamic mode made no connections between children's mental health and questions of a social or political nature. Indeed, the psychodynamic mode's dyad-centered set of entities becomes even 20 more intriguing once we contrast it with the contemporaneous neuro-centered mode's emphasis on the important relation between the 'disordered' child and society.…”

“…But while some children and parents have directly interacted with child psychological and psychiatric experts, many have not. Instead, newspapers, magazines, radio and television have been important avenues for disseminating psychological and psychiatric notions of, for instance, childhood disorders and risks, good parenthood, and therapeutic methods (Börjesson, 1999;Clarke, 2011;Jones, 2012;Shapira, 2013Shapira, , 2017. Analyses of media material are thus crucial for the history of psychology and psychiatry as the media has been one of the historically significant ways through which experts and professionals have been able to present their understandings and explanations to the general public and speak to those who are otherwise out of reach.…”

Den offentliga ohälsan : En historisk studie av barnpsykologi och -psykiatri i svensk media 1968-2008

“…Till att börja med har litteraturen visat att media historiskt sett varit en viktig plats där psykologer, psykiatrer och terapeuter adresserat allmänheten gällande barns hälsa och utveckling. Flera studier har fokuserat på brittiska psy-experter, bland annat inflytelserika barnpsykoanalytiker såsom Donald Winnicott och Susan Isaacs som under 1900-talet första halva medverkade i radio respektive frågespalter (Shapira, 2013(Shapira, , 2017 medan exempelvis John Bowlby, en av huvudpersonerna bakom anknytningsteorin, regelbundet skrev i en inflytelserik brittisk föräldratidning under 1950-talet (Thomson, 2013). Även i den amerikanska kontexten har barnpsy-experter såsom psykoanalytikern Bruno Bettelheim och barnläkaren Benjamin Spock varit återkommande inslag i den offentliga debatten om barns hälsa och utveckling (Hulbert, 2004).…”

“Don't worry”: Figurations of the child in a Swedish parenting advice column.

“…Although Alfvén’s pragmatic and nontheoretical approach may account for some of her popularity (cf. Shapira’s, 2017, discussion of Susan Isaacs), it does make it more difficult to untangle which “child psy” theories and notions of the child underpinned her advice and to chart the various expert and professional networks of which she was part. In this article, I have tried to offer some possible understandings of what may have influenced her by pointing to the history of the “psy” sciences, to certain notions of the child that were prominent in the Nordic countries, and to the orientation of VFö as a magazine.…”

“…Following this, 20th-century experts used various media channels to reach out to the public, underlining the importance these had for the circulation of “child psy” expertise. To give some examples, in Britain, Donald Winnicott was frequently featured in BBC radio broadcasts, and Susan Isaacs popularized the theories of Melanie Klein in the journal Nursery World (Shapira, 2013, 2017). Even John Bowlby relied on writing in the popular magazine Parent to spread the—nowadays, very influential—theory of children’s attachment to their caretakers (Thomson, 2013).…”