Read This Too Shall Pass for Free Online

Marlowe – reduced to ordinariness by his long beard and stalwart face, eyes forward into the camera lens like an early explorer – purchased it and set up an institution for handicapped kids.
    The old house where the disabled kids lived – also portrayed in historic pictures – was eventually knocked down and the present building – a picture of the first brick being laid hung in one of the endless corridors too – had been purpose-built for child psychiatry, or, if you believe the sceptics, child hoodoo-foodoo. The place received this because of endless reports from the community that we performed a dangerous game of pathologising children, often dubbing them with erroneous and unhelpful labels and sending them back out of our castle walls worse off than when they’d arrived. Also – apparently – whenever we could, we were into apportioning blame. The blame, of course, was pinned on mothers.
    As we tried to undo this concept – touting that our cases were unique and complicated – all we managed to do, according to our critics, was back up their claims. Our methodology alone – labelling, sectioning off, medicating – was a crime, they said, especially when most kids had good reason for their troubles: growing up poor, witnessing violence, suffering sexual abuse, and all of this was perpetuated by a lack of good policy, and laws that did not adequately deal with perpetrators. (Psychiatry wasn’t going to help!)
    In fact, the view of those working in the community, in charitable organisations and in foster care, those whose caseloads teemed with kids and adolescents needing our services, was that the only thing going on at Marlowe Downs was the reinforcing of the status quo of children and women as being of zero value. Instead of taking the reality of their situations into account, we were bandaiding, even joining with the oppressor, both individual and state. Added to that, our out-of-date methods were offensive. In short, we were carrying out systemic abuse.
    The subject of our reputation among both government and non-government organisations – not to mention a considerable number of disgruntled parents who saw our shortcomings firsthand – was taboo inside the walls of Marlowe Downs. The clinicians were, according to our PR press club, beyond reproach. With the shutters closed tightly and the walls and roof insulated well, we were to be protected from having to listen and if we did happen to hear, we were to take no notice. As long as it didn’t get into the papers, we could stay out of reach and out of range. But that, in itself, was just another thing the critics were accusing us of.
    So how did I know this? I lived in a world between two worlds. A politically vivid, if not radical, women’s feminist perspective was fed to me via Renny and her peers who worked in the area of domestic violence. They had been perfecting the art of lobbying. To them the tenets of Freud, Jung, Lacan and all who followed in their footsteps, were skewed, and dangerously so. It didn’t help that Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, and other female analysts like Melanie Klein, had become involved. Freud and his cronies should have been hung, drawn and quartered, their theories and following disbanded.
    â€˜There are things we don’t accept now,’ was my point to Renny (a point I never succeeded in making, but which I also never gave up on) ‘but that doesn’t mean all of it’s useless.’
    I know why the distrust existed: a lot of bad things have been done in the name of Freud – were done even by the hand of Freud. And Jung, having entered into unethical relations with the women he treated, would be struck from today’s medical registers if he was still practising. But apart from the obvious argument that there’s no point in reading theorists out of the context of their times, it is also true to say that they came up with the