In his novel Double-Wolf (1991), Brian Castro brought the story of one of Sigmund Freud’s most famous patients, the Wolf Man, to the Blue Mountains. Throughout his career, the poet Alec Hope was alert to aspects of Freudian psychology. In one poem he conceived of individuals as ‘wandering islands’, while in his criticism he borrowed Freud’s notion of ‘dream work’ to explain some of the generative processes of his poetry. Neither author appears in Joy Damousi’s fine and welcome study, Freud in the Antipodes, although she does trace the influence of Freud’s theories on visual artists, especially in the 1940s.
Damousi (whose book’s range is more inclusive than its title suggests) begins by distinguishing between psychology, concerned with the conscious world and socialisation, and psychoanalysis, which ‘privileges the life of the unconscious as the way to understanding psychic life’. Her intention is to relate the story of psychoanalysis in Australia, particularly in intellectual circles and within less sceptical sections of the medical profession. What she does not include, presumably because it might be thought of as hearsay, is the penetration of ersatz Freudianism as far down as school playgrounds in the 1950s and 1960s, when introvert/extrovert, inferiority/superiority complex were ways in which kids sought to understand and perhaps to brand one another.
Damousi’s introduction announces three grand themes: the ‘gradual move through the 20th century in both medical and general terms to concentrated listening’; the appropriation of Freudian thought for ‘different temporal and cultural reasons’; and the way in which Freudian theories have been used ‘to shape the idea of the “self” in modern society’. The movement of the book is chronological. The narrative is punctuated by pen portraits of leading figures—practitioners and controversialists in the history of psychoanalysis in Australia.
There are illuminating details of wider social history. Despite the unprepossessing introduction—‘The auditory self in the age of modernity’—Damousi analyses how, ‘as with the practice of psychoanalysis, radio established a relationship between the speaker and the listener, in ways which could be both intimate and therapeutic’. She also discusses the rise of the ‘talkies’ and of the telephone, which became so vital to business communications from the 1930s.
The historical sweep of Freud in the Antipodes begins with Victorian notions of the causes and right treatment of insanity. Physical methods were applied, but some doctors—such as the Australian John Springthorpe—began to wonder how they could ‘better access the mind’. Damousi aptly notes