Sundry Reflections from the Professional Psychology Establishment

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Stories from the School Playground

The year is 1976, I am thirteen. It was the dawning of my and my peers’ adult sexuality. Two topics of discussion hold sway for many a playground hour: they were the mechanics of sexuality and “kaffir bashing”. Thirteen was a time of a perhaps first conscious consideration of ourselves as sexual subjects. Where woman in general became the subject of extreme interest and curiosity, somewhere on the outreaches of consciousness the woman who was referred to often was black. For some of the boys it was a time to try out their now mature sexual organs and to dabble with a new sexual identity. Part of the gossip centred on those boys who had “done it”. Then again, even more taboo were those who had “done it” with a woman of colour. As much as having “gone all the way” inspired awe, it also invited scorn. The playground grapevine told us that for some it had been with a domestic worker, with the domestic worker’s children or perhaps with a black woman who exchanged sexual favours for money (a prostitute). Harking back to the schoolyard, I recollect the boys making plans for a weekend first sexual foray, a visit to a local prostitute – she was a black woman. For those not brave or fortunate enough to have precociously become wise in the ways of the world, there was the tittering of schoolboy scatology where the body parts of particular women become the subject of enquiry. It was not uncommon for a domestic worker or black woman, to be the object of such banter.

Stories from the Consulting Room

Together the previously cited examples may not seem to add up to more than a series of highly idiosyncratic personal recollections. Friends and associates disconfirm this and in fact, suggest that such occurrences were common to the ‘whites only’ apartheid schoolyard. Over the years in long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice, I have now become used to seeing nannies referred to as significant attachment figures by both adults and children. Discussion with professional colleagues would serve to affirm the recurrent, unbidden appearance of the nanny in their patients’ narratives – whether it be in symptomatic fragments or direct recall. In 1979, British psychoanalyst Isca Saltzer Wittenburg visited South Africa. Her sojourn provided the impetus to the formation of the Johannesburg Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Group (Hamburger, 1992). Notwithstanding, at one particular clinical meeting she urged practitioners to develop psychoanalytic models germane to the local situation. Purportedly, she admonished the participants for the failure to give sufficient credence to the nanny – a common feature to the supervisory case presentations of the evening in question (Hamburger, 2003). To further illuminate these questions I offer the case of Mr. Z.

Getting Waylaid – John Bowbly, Attachment Theory and ‘Disruption of

Parental Attachment’ as an Idea Fixé John Bowbly entered the ‘nanny debate’ amidst the zeitgeist of the rapid psychoanalytic developments in World War II England. Initially, Bowbly stood aloof from the controversy of the day (“the Controversial Discussions” between the Kleinians and the Anna Freudians [c.f. King & Steiner, 1991]). Later he went into voluntary exile, drifting away from the Psychoanalytic Society. It was his discovery of ethology in the 1950’s that provided the opportunity he was looking for to put psychoanalysis onto a sound scientific footing (Holmes, 1993). Konrad Lorenz’s work on imprinting and Harlow’s’ observations of (and interventions with) the behaviour of infant monkeys had a particularly profound influence on his thinking. Attachment Theory came to stand as a discipline in its own right, owing much to psychoanalysis, but with links also to, ethology, systems theory, evolutionary theory and cognitive psychology (Holmes, 1993). Inasmuch as his ideas were widely distributed and discussed through the popular press and cheap publishing houses, Bowbly had wide popular appeal, certainly more than any other psychoanalytic thinker of his day. Bowbly’s theories are complex, themselves having gone through a series of revisions. It is not possible to give a full account of his work.

The Nanny’s Appearance in the Consulting Room

Bowbly alerted us to the fact that nanny can and does have a very important part to play in her charge’s psychology. For him it is the person who is the child’s principle caretaker who comes to be imbued with primary attachment significance. Commonly this is the mother or a biological parent, but it can also be a nanny. The chosen figure’s significance derives from his/her steady proximity and ongoing labour of love. Bowbly, though, stopped short. He was unable to consider nanny’s specific significance more than that of a surrogate or shadowy form of mother. From the vantage-point of “attachment” he could not appreciate that the nanny is never simply that of stand in parent – there is always something distinct and particular that defines her position vis-à-vis the child. The empiricists’ explorations unfortunately take our investigation no further, for Bowbly’s dilemma defined their terms of reference. Insofar as they remain spellbound, adjudicating the merits and demerits of substitute mothering, the nanny’s specific connotation for the child is barred from consideration. Let’s hear what the children themselves say of their nannies.

Lay Offerings on the Subject

The nanny, the domestic worker, the nursemaid and the household servant, crops up again and again in Literature. She is Mary Poppins, she is the governess of Sound of Music, the nursemaid of Bed knobs and Broomsticks. Author and playwrights have been more willing to acknowledge the part played by these women in their lives. In this section I take cursory samplings of this body of work. We will consider those who idolise their nanny, we will consider those who denigrate her offerings. There are a whole host of cryptic, en passant references to the nanny. These include the likes of George Bernard Shaw, who was brought up almost entirely by nursemaids, saying of his mother: “her almost complete neglect of me had the advantage that I could idolise her to the utmost pitch of my imagination and had no sordid or disillusioning contacts with her” (in McClintock, 1995, p. 87). This echoes Freud’s maternal sentiments: “to me she was a perfect mother. I would have not liked her to dose me, bathe me, comfort me or hold my head when I was sick. These intimate functions were performed by Nanny or by Annie our nursemaid” (in Hardin, 1988a, p. 74). Nannies could also inspire the devotion and dependence of a lifetime. This is Winston Churchill’s Mrs. Everest, connoted the “dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years that I had lived”, “the principal confidante of my joys, my troubles” (Gathorne-Hardy, 1972, p. 41).

TABLE OF CONTENTS :

• DECLARATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• 1 INTRODUCTION
  • 1.1 Some Personal Musings on the Black Nanny – White Little Boy Relationship
  • 1.1.1 Stories from the School Playground
  • 1.1.2 Stories from the Consulting Room
    • 1.1.2.1 An Unexpected Profligate
    • 1.1.3 Stories from a Wider Context
    • 1.1.3.1 1985 – A Downtown Johannesburg Nightclub
  • 1.1.3.2 A Snippet from a Film Documentary
  • 1.2 Summary
  • 1.3 Aims
  • 1.4 The Ensuing Thesis Chapters
• 2 THE THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF THE PRESENT STUDY: STANDING AT THE INTERSECTION OF CULTURE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
  • 2.1 Mapping the Theoretical Terrain
  • 2.1.1 White ‘Apartheid’ Men as Research Participants – the Invisibility of the Centre
  • 2.1.2 Generally Speaking – Operationalising our Problematic
  • 2.1.3 Between Experience, Narrative and Memory
  • 2.1.4 “Remembered Experience” as a Point of Departure
  • 2.1.4.1 “Remembered Experience” an Interface – a Site of Intertwining of Discourse and the Unconscious
  • 2.1.4.2 “Remembered Experience” as the Preserve of the Subjective, the Phenomenological, the Personal Everyday of Life
  • 2.1.4.3 “Remembered Experience” as the Project of Feminism
  • 2.2 Culture as Constitutive of Remembered Experience
  • 2.2.1 Race/Class – the Call to be White and Privileged
    • .2 Gender – the Call to be a Man
  • 2.2.2.1 Some White, Male South African Ethnographies
  • 2.3 The Unconscious aspect of Experience/Remembered Experience
  • 2.3.1 Why Psychoanalysis? – Making a Space for the Non-Discursive
  • 2.3.2 The Place of “Remembered Experience” in Psychoanalysis
  • 2.3.2.1 Freud and Memory
  • 2.3.3 Which Psychoanalysis? – Giving Content and Form to the Non-Discursive
• 3 LOCATING THE NANNY’S EXPERIENCE
  • 3.1 Chapter Outline
  • 3.2 An Adumbrated History of Childcare
  • 3.3 The Emergence of the Nanny as an Institution
  • 3.3.1 The Wet Nurse
  • 3.3.2 The Victorian Nanny
  • 3.4 Childcare – The Contemporary International Scene
  • 3.5 The Unique Position of the Domestic Worker in South Africa pre
  • 3.6 The Domestic Worker’s Response to her Oppression
• 4 CONSTRUCTION OF THE NANNY IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE – THE DOMESTIC WORKER’S SIGNIFICANCE FOR HER YOUNG CHARGE
  • 4.1 Chapter Outline
  • 4.2 A Veritable Silence
  • 4.2.1 The Nanny’s Unbidden Appearance in Freud’s Personal Life
  • 4.2.1.1 The Evidence – Freud’s Written Descriptions of this Woman
  • 4.2.1.2 What are We to Make of Freud’s Recollections: Who is a Screen for Whom?
  • 4.2.1.3 Kinderfraü is Not So Easily Dispensed With
  • 4.2.1.4 Concluding Freud and the Kinderfraü
  • 4.3 First Investigations – Attachment as a Starting Point
  • 4.3.1 Considering the “Substitute Mother” – World War II at the Hampstead Nurseries
  • 4.3.2 Getting Waylaid – John Bowbly, Attachment Theory and ‘Disruption of Parental Attachment’ as an Idea Fixé
  • 4.3.3 The Empiricists Keep Things Simple: Non-parental Care as Good/Bad for the Infant
  • 4.4 The Nanny’s Appearance in the Consulting Room
  • 4.4.1 Sundry Reflections from the Professional Psychology Establishment
  • 4.4.2 Harry T. Hardin – The Nanny in the First Year and a Half of Life of the Child’s Life
  • 4.5. Lay Offerings on the Subject
  • 4.6 The South African Corpus of Knowledge
  • 4.6.1 Disparate Strands
  • 4.6.2 Diane Wulfsohn – The Impact of the South African Nanny on the Young Child
  • 4.6.3 Beyond Wulfsohn (1988) – Outstanding Issues and The Present Research
• 5 METHODOLOGY
  • 5.1 Aims
  • 5.2 Method
  • 5.2.1 Methodological Orientation – between Discourse Analysis and Psychoanalysis
  • 5.2.1.1 A Social Constructionist/Discursive starting point
  • 5.2.1.2 A Psychoanalytically Informed Methodology
  • 5.2.1.3 Psychoanalytic Narrative Interviewing – elaborating and extending the Hollway & Jefferson/Frosh et al Approach
  • 5.2.1.3.1 Intersubjectivity and the Research Relationship
  • 5.2.1.3.2 The Free Association Narrative Technique
  • 5.2.1.3.3 Sensitive topics, defended subjects and the unspoken data
  • 5.2.1.3.4 Symptomatic Reading as a Research Tool
  • 5.2.2 The Sample
    • 5.2.2.1 Method of Obtaining the Participants
    • 5.2.2.2 Participants
    • 5.2.2.3 Description of the Sample
  • 5.2.3 Design
  • 5.2.4 Procedure
    • 5.2.4.1 Interviews
    • 5.2.4.2 Interview Afterthoughts – Critical Self reflection, Note Taking and the Countertransference
  • 5.3 Data Analysis
    • 5.3.1 Data Analytic Orientation
    • 5.3.2 The Diary as a Starting Point
    • 5.3.3 Immersion in the Data
    • 5.3.4 Thematic Analysis
    • 5.3.5 Narrative Analysis
    • 5.3.6 The Concrete Data Analytic Steps
      • 5.3.6.1 Regarding Memories
      • 5.3.6.2 Appropriating Experience – Nanny’s Continued Existence in the Present
• 5.4 Concluding Remarks
• 6 RESULTS
• 7 DISCUSSION
• 8 CONCLUSION
• 9 REFERENCES
• 10 APPENDICES

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White Boyhood under Apartheid: The Experience of Being Looked After by a Black Nanny