Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2006 Truth as Relationship: The syP chology of E. Graham Howe Ian Charles Edwards Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Edwards, I. (2006). Truth as Relationship: The sP ychology of E. Graham Howe (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/518 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Truth as Relationship: The Psychology of E. Graham Howe By Ian C. Edwards A Dissertation Presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology Duquesne University 2006 2 To Cindy and Seth, for their everlasting love and enduring patience. 3 Table of Contents PART I INTRODUCTION Chapter 1 The Importance of E. Graham Howe’s Work pg. 5 PART II HOWE’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS Chapter 2 Situating Howe pg . 25 Chapter 3 Howe’s Psychology of Depression pg. 67 Chapter 4 Howe on the Inferiority Complex pg. 84 Chapter 5 Howe’s Psychology of Love pg. 106 Chapter 6 Howe’s “Selves” Psychology pg. 129 PART III THE CENTRAL THEMES OF HOWE’S PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 7 The Psychology and Philosophy of Relationship pg. 173 Chapter 8 The Psychology for the Whole Man pg. 187 Chapter 9 Time and the Unconscious: Howe’s Dialog with Jung pg. 199 Chapter 10 The Psychology of War pg. 215 Chapter 11 Psychotherapy: The Art and Science of Healing pg. 225 PART IV CONCLUSION Chapter 12 Howe’s Legacy pg. 237 Bibliography pg. 241 4 PART I Introduction 5 CHAPTER 1 The Importance of E. Graham Howe’s Work “This country (England) has a curious way of ignoring its great men when they are alive, and honouring them when they are dead. I doubt if this worries Eric Graham Howe very much, but it would be a pity for us if we are not to recognize that here is a distillation of a master psychologist” - R.D. Laing in his Foreword to Cure or Heal? Dr. Eric Graham Howe (d. 1975) was one of the most important psychologists in early 20 th century Britain. Yet, for the most part, his work is relatively unknown. In 13 books and countless articles, Howe wrote on a wide variety of topics, exerting a profound influence on R.D. Laing, Alan Watts, and Henry Miller, to name a few. In a foreword to Howe’s Cure or Heal? A Study of Therapeutic Experience (1965) R.D. Laing wrote that Howe’s books “differed from any others by psychiatrists in this country (England), in that they brought to bear on empirical issues an understanding that derived from spiritual experience” (p. 9). Laing went on to assert that because Howe’s books “were written in a clear and simple way, unimpeded by psychiatric jargon, the psychiatric profession evaded giving them serious attention…” (Howe, 1965, p. 9). During the early 20 th century there was a groundswell of interest in psychoanalysis in England. This interest prompted the formation of the Tavistock Clinic in 1920. Howe, who was one of its founding members, published the first series of articles on psychotherapy in The Lancet . In the 1930’s and 40’s, when 6 controversies over Sigmund and Anna Freud and Melanie Klein swept much of British psychiatry, Howe’s jargon-free writings were destined for certain obscurity. With its own semantics and pragmatics, psychoanalysis became a kind of dogma that had both adherents and detractors. In order to maintain doctrinal purity, mainstream psychoanalysis employed a clearly defined theoretical framework that functioned to say something about its theory rather than simply describe psychological life. By making minimal use of psychoanalytic words and concepts such as, projection, regression, reaction formation, and splitting, Howe affiliated himself with a theoretical out-group that the mainstream reserved for Jungians, mystics, occultists, and bohemians. Yet, when Howe did utilize psychoanalytic concepts, he did so for the purpose of illuminating his patients’ psychological lives, rather than displaying the brilliant edifice of psychoanalytic theory, as was often the case with orthodox psychoanalysts in Howe’s day. And because of the warring factions, the brilliant edifice of psychoanalytic theory often seemed like a virtual tower of Babel, which confounded and obfuscated critics and practitioners alike. Except for a brief period at its inception, mainstream psychoanalysis frowned upon many of its more independent and innovative thinkers. Howe’s emphasis on the primacy of the individual and his distaste for the growing psychoanalytic monopoly of psychotherapy led him to become highly critical of the British Psychoanalytic Schools; and it motivated him to explore alternative approaches to the mind, e.g. Phenomenology, Buddhism, etc. Yet, as Dr. John 7 Heaton, author of The Self, TheDivided Self and the Other (1994), observed, while refusing the label of psychoanalyst, Howe also eschewed the labels of “Buddhist,” “Existentialist,” etc. (Personal Correspondence, March 2003). A label of any kind shifts the emphasis toward the associated school and away from the individual whose dynamics the school purports to be studying. Howe’s unwillingness to embrace any label suggested that he was an “anti- systematic” thinker, much like Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Krishnamurti, and R.D. Laing. According to Daniel Burston, “an anti-systematic thinker is one who lives by the conviction that no single system of ideas can possibly encompass or express the depth and complexity of the psyche or the cosmos, and that efforts to do so inevitably shut down the possibility of authentic encounter (with cosmos and/or self)” (Personal Correspondence, June 2003). Thus, anti-systematic thinkers are not simply “un-systematic,” in that they lack a system. They reject “systems” on principle. Why? Because any psychotherapy or wisdom tradition that requires the acceptance of a clearly defined conceptual apparatus in order for “healing,” “salvation,” “enlightenment,” “wholeness,” etc. to occur is simply offering the individual a better furnished prison, rather than true freedom. From Howe’s perspective, psychoanalysis liberated its adherents from the crippling effects of religious and scientific dogma, while creating a new conceptual prison that subtly enslaved patients to a different master. Unfortunately, Howe’s aversion to dogma and a “party line” had tangible consequences for his reception. In 1933, Howe had lunch with Ernest Jones, who 8 wanted him to join the British Psychoanalytic Society. Howe refused. He disliked Jones, whom he found quite “shifty” (Heaton, Personal Correspondence, March 2003), and probably distrusted him on account of the embargo that Jones put on the Tavistock Clinic. 1 Jones, then head of the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, felt threatened by the Tavistock Clinic’s eclecticism, and prevented serious students from coming in contact with “unorthodox” ideas. Howe was very much at home in the Tavistock Clinic. But the fact that he was a major player at its inception scarcely registers in the literature. Eric Trist’s three-volume Tavistock anthology The Social Engagement of Social Science (1993) does not even mention Howe or his writings. In fairness to Trist, perhaps, his work chronicles the development of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations from 1941-1989, and says little about the period preceding WW II. It is often assumed that the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations refer to the same organization. This is because the founders of the Tavistock Institute were known as the “Tavistock Group”, on account their being core members of the pre-WW II Tavistock Clinic (See Trist, 1993, p. xi). While members of the Tavistock Clinic founded the Tavistock Institute, they were different organizations. Immediately after World War I there was a growing recognition that neurotic disabilities were not merely transitory phenomena related to the stress of war, but were pervasive in modern society. In order to address this “felt social 1 See Dorothy Heard’s Introduction to Ian Suttie’s The Origins of Love and Hate . 9 need,” the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology (better known as the Tavistock Clinic), the parent body of the post-World War II Institute, was founded in 1920 by Hugh Crichton-Miller as a voluntary outpatient facility (See Trist, 1993, p. 1). Unlike Trist, whose anthology deals with the Tavistock Institute, H.V. Dicks’ Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic (1970) deals specifically with the history of the Tavistock Clinic. It was difficult for Dicks to obtain any of the Clinic’s records from the 1920’s and 30’s because most of them were destroyed in the bombing of London during World War II. Despite that fact, some annual reports and a few press cuttings were retained. The Tavistock Clinic was basically psychodynamic in its orientation. This orientation was referred to as the “New Psychology,” and combined the insights of both Freud and Jung. One of the major differences between the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the Tavistock Clinic is that the Institute was firmly grounded in the object-relations theoretical orientation whereas the Clinic remained cheerfully eclectic, insisting on having “no doctrine.” Consequently, when Hugh Crichton-Miller sought to employ staff members for the Tavistock Clinic, he did not seek psychiatrists and psychologists on the basis of their theoretical orientation. Rather, “the appointments to the staff were made chiefly from those who decided to devote themselves to psychotherapy or psychological medicine as their way of life” (Dicks, 1970, p. 34). Howe was recruited from the residences at Bethlem and Bowden House, which had opened an offshoot for psychotics at Oxhey Grove.