I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
“Live the questions now.” Rainer Maria Rilke
Thank you for visiting this page. I’m Julia, and I work as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, relationship counsellor, and clinical supervisor. I’ve been in private practice in the City of London and in south-west London for the past three years; for the decade before that, I worked as a specialist psychotherapist for working age adults in the NHS (where I’ve also run staff groups).
This is where you will find the posts on my London-based blog, which I update constantly through the week, almost as a stream of consciousness. It reflects my interests, including psychotherapy, and my weekly experience outside – though not divorced from – my work. It’s a contemporary version of the commonplace book – one where the thoughts, responses, and comments of others are welcome.
Postbox topper, George Street, Richmond upon Thames
“‘When our little Mathilde-baby chuckles, we think it the most beautiful thing that could happen to us.’”
Mathilde Freud (1887–1978), named after Josef Breuer’s wife, was the eldest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children. She married Robert Höllischer (1875–1959); they had no children. In 1938 Mathilde and her husband, her parents, three brothers and two sisters moved to England after Hitler annexed Austria. Mathilde Höllischer opened ‘Robell’, a women’s fashion store on Baker Street. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403614146131
From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“…the Freuds had been entitled to think that their investment in a good address would pay off. Maria Theresenstrasse 8 lay right by the Ringstrasse, a neighborhood of arrived doctors and distinguished professionals. Anton Bruckner, for example, lived opposite at Hessgasse 7 and could afford the rent, having only himself to support on his joint salaries as instructor at the Conservatory and organist at the Palace Chapel. But if the old musician ever troubled to look down from his fourth-floor clutter to the young doctor’s orderly household on the second floor across the street, he would have seen precious few patients in the waiting room.
Greatness, or at least great success, hovered somewhere around the corner, but it did not enter here. Freud was as stymied as anyone else in Vienna. At the start of his career he had tried a cocaine cure on depressives — disastrously. Some patients became addicted. And though young Dr. Arthur Schnitzler — as it happened — published an article praising Freud’s cocaine experiments, the medical establishment turned against him. Now he was using bath cures, rest cures, electrotherapy and, finally, hypnosis in partnership with Josef Breuer.
Breuer, however, was a leading physician in town, doctor to the city’s most distinguished neurotics, summer resident of a spacious house on the Gmundner Lake. Freud, younger and much less deft with patients, spent the first July weekend of 1888 in a little pension which made do as a summer resort for his family. Because of his train phobia during those years the doctor took the horse coach to the village of Maria-Schutz in the Semmering Alps, just beyond the Vienna Woods, but only twenty miles from Mayerling. He arrived drenched by the same rain as Rudolf’s hunting lodge, brushed at by the same breeze that hissed through the twigs of the black fir. Among the rootwork of these pines grew large tangy mushrooms, the Herrenpilze which Freud liked to eat and loved to hunt during damp weather. But when could he find time? His mind was already swarming with great surmises. They all went against the dogma of the University Psychiatric Clinic. Freud was kept from an appointment there by his own ideas, though he had little leisure to explore them that summer. In the city he spent himself with his nerve-doctor chores. On his country weekends he did medical hackwork. Right now, in July 1888, he was grinding out anonymous articles for Villaret’s Medical Dictionary together with a translation of a French alienist’s treatise. He had (as he confessed later) the temperament of “a great adventurer, a conquistador, a Pizarro.” Yet that summer he maintained a drudge’s resignation and pretended to an iron fatalism.
“Life goes on tolerably well here,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, Wilhelm Fliess. “We live in constantly increasing unassumingness. When our little Mathilde-baby chuckles, we think it the most beautiful thing that could happen to us. Otherwise we are not very ambitious. … My practice grew a little in the winter and spring and is now dropping off again, but it just keeps us alive. Such time and opportunity as there has been for work has gone on… matters not worthy of note. … In short, life goes on, and life is known to be very difficult and very complicated, and, as we say in Vienna, many roads lead to the Central Cemetery.” Freud’s mood may have been colored by the inclemency of that early summer of 1888…”
“outstandingly good music that still has to fight to be heard.”
See YEAR OF WONDER: Classical Music for Every Day (2017), by Clemency Burton-Hill: 14th May entry.
No. 3 in E flat major: Andante soave by Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847)
“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.”*
*from Brideshead Revisited (1945), by Evelyn Waugh.
From Nancy Mitford (1985), by Selina Hastings:
“…Evelyn encouraged her not to give up. ‘It is good news that you may take up the pen again. Please give the results to Chapman & Hall. They love losing money and I will get you a substantial over advance.’
He himself had just finished Brideshead Revisited, which he had sent Nancy to read in proof. ‘A great English classic in my humble opinion,’ she told him. ‘Oh how I shld like to chat about it, there are one or 2 things I long to know. Are you, or not, on Lady Marchmain’s side. I can’t make out … One dreadful error. Diamond clips were only invented about 1930 you wore a diamond arrow in your cloche. It’s the only one, which I call good – the only one I spotted at least.’ When it came out in May 1945 he asked her to report back on its reception. Colonel, she was able to tell him, had telephoned from Paris to say that ‘people are giving luncheon parties to discuss the book & the Windsors have given it to everyone for Xmas. Rather low-brow circles I fear but still!’ And she herself had ‘a great deal to say – 2 air letters (1/-, agony) if necessary & the whole evening before me… I am answering your letter about Brideshead. I quite see how the person who tells is dim but then would Julia & her brother & her sister all be in love with him if he was? Well love is like that & one never can tell. What I can’t understand is about God. Now I believe in God & I talk to him a very great deal & often tell him jokes but the God I believe in simply hates fools more than anything & he also likes people to be happy & people who love each other to live together – so long as nobody else’s life is upset (& then he’s not sure). Now I see that I am absolutely religious. I also see this because what is a red rag to a bull to several people about your book is the subtle clever Catholic propaganda & I hardly noticed there was any which shows I am immune from it Now about what people think:
Raymond: Great English classic
Cyril: Brilliant where the narrative is straightforward. Doesn’t care for the “purple passages” ie death bed of Lord M. thinks you go too much to White’s. But found it impossible to put down (no wonder)
Osbert: Jealous – doesn’t like talking about it ‘I’m devoted to Evelyn – are you?’
Maurice: showing off to Cyril about how you don’t always hit the right word or some nonsense but obviously much impressed & thinks the Oxford part perfect.
SW7 (European royal quarter) Heaven darling
Diana Abdy: like me & Raymond, no fault to find
Lady Chetwode: Terribly dangerous propaganda Brilliant
General view: It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.’”
“Nowhere was it easier to be a European,” wrote Stefan Zweig,..
…that great elegist of Viennese cosmopolitanism, who gave Freud’s eulogy and, less than three years later, in 1942, took his own life, unable to watch as his “spiritual homeland” destroyed itself.”
Stephen Heyman wrote in the New York Times of Aug. 29, 2014:
“…Freud loved vacations, and referred to his annual quest to find the right warm-weather retreat as the “Sommerproblem.” For one thing, vacation offered a chance to leave the city that he supposedly detested. “I hate Vienna,” he wrote, “and, just the contrary of the giant Antaeus, I draw fresh strength whenever I remove my feet from the soil of the city which is my home.”
But Freud did not always need to journey far. Vienna is both a city and a province of Austria, and Zweig wrote about how liminal that division can seem, how it’s hard to notice where nature ends and the city begins. Within a few minutes’ taxi ride, you can be up in the hills, surrounded by woods, valleys, vineyards. One of the loveliest of these outlying areas is Himmel — literally “heaven” — in Vienna’s 19th district. It’s here that Freud summered in 1895 and had the most famous dream in the history of psychology.
The dream itself is complicated. It involved Freud trying to absolve himself for the mishandling of a patient named Irma…
[“…However, the dream presents a further enigma: whose desire does it manifest? Recent commentaries clearly establish that the true motivation behind the dream was Freud’s desire to absolve Fliess, his close friend and collaborator, of responsibility and guilt. It was Fliess who botched Irma’s nose operation, and the dream’s desire is not to exculpate Freud himself, but his friend, who was, at this point, Freud’s ‘subject supposed to know’, the object of his transference. The dream dramatises his wish to show that Fliess wasn’t responsible for the medical failure, that he wasn’t lacking in knowledge. The dream does manifest Freud’s desire – but only insofar as his desire is already the Other’s (Fliess’s) desire…” (Slavoj Žižek, now international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, and the author of Absolute Recoil and Trouble in Paradise.)]
…But his analysis of it, and the resulting conclusion — that dreams are wish fulfillments — proved revolutionary. Freud was staying at the Schloss Bellevue, a spa hotel, when he had the dream and when he returned there, a few years later, he wrote to his friend, “Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will be placed on this building, inscribed with the words, ‘In this building on July 24 1895, the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud’? At this moment I see little prospect of it.”
Schloss Bellevue has long since disappeared, but a stele memorializing the spot has been placed in a green meadow across from where the hotel stood. Freud described the hotel as paradise: “Life at Bellevue is most pleasant for everyone; the scent of acacias and jasmine now follow lilac and laburnum, the dog roses are blossoming and all this happens, as I can observe, rather suddenly.”…”
“chamber music that creates a mood of exchange and dialogue between autonomous musical voices.”
See YEAR OF WONDER: Classical Music for Every Day (2017), by Clemency Burton-Hill: 13th May entry.
“The common stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus…
…The spore mass typically smells of carrion or dung, and attracts flies, beetles and other insects to help disperse the spores. Although there is great diversity in body structure shape among the various genera, all species in the Phallaceae begin their development as oval or round structures known as “eggs”. The appearance of Phallaceae is often sudden, as gleba can erupt from the underground egg and burst open within an hour.” (Wikipedia)
From Bitch: What does it mean to be female? (2022), by Lucy Cooke:
“…In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, (Darwin) insisted that the creative exuberance of sexual selection didn’t act on genitalia. He considered sex organs to be primary sexual characteristics – survival essentials and therefore under the utilitarian guidance of natural selection alone. Sexual selection only acted on secondary sexual characteristics – unessential frivolities such as bright plumage or unwieldy antlers; the sexual dimorphisms involved in either male-male competition or female choice.
As a consequence there was no need for pudendum to rear its head in the pages of his book on sexual selection. This must have pleased his daughter Henrietta, who edited his work and, if her opinion on phallic-shaped fungi is anything to go by, readily wielded her red pen when faced with anything too racy. In later life, this Victorian matriarch was said to have spearheaded a campaign to rid the English countryside of the obscenely shaped stinkhorn mushroom – Phallus impudicus – because of the effect that seeing it might have on female sensibilities…”
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/unpublished-journal-offers-new-take-on-darwins-daughter
From Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952), by Gwen Raverat:
“…Aunt Etty was my father’s elder sister Henrietta; and she had married Uncle Richard Litchfield, who worked on the legal side of the Ecclesiastical Commission (and was a founder of the Working Men’s College). The Darwin brothers were always inclined to laugh at him; indeed there still survives the unkind saying of one of them, that ‘Little Richards have long ears’. And, of course, they sometimes laughed at Aunt Etty, too! But I liked him very much, because he talked to me as if I were quite grown-up…
…She once said to me, about the Roman occupation of Britain—in her most downright tone: ‘Don’t tell me‘ (I wasn’t telling her), ‘that all those Roman soldiers lived all that time in England and didn’t leave a lot of Roman babies behind them. And a very good thing, too, I dare say.’…
…Down, my grandmother’s house, had a different flavour, much cooler and barer, less of the earth, less comfortable: a fresco in pale clear colours, a simpler, larger pattern. Aunt Etty was generally at Down when we went there, but she was only an incident there, though an important one, bringing a breath of her own warm atmosphere with her.
When Uncle Richard died Aunt Etty moved to a house near Gomshall in Surrey; and there she transformed a very ordinary villa into the same Earthly Paradise we had known in London; only now there was a garden and a wood to replace the mysterious charm of the old Kensington Square house, where Esmond’s mistress and the lovely Beatrix might have lived.
The journey to Burrow’s Hill was always a happy one…
…This little wood was also the scene of a form of sport, of which Aunt Etty can claim to be the inventor; and which certainly deserves to be more widely known. In our native woods there grows a kind of toadstool, called in the vernacular The Stinkhorn, though in Latin it bears a grosser name. The name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by the scent alone; and this was Aunt Etty’s great invention. Armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here and there, her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and poke his putrid carcase into her basket. At the end of the day’s sport, the catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids. Perhaps now that there are no maids, this part of the ritual does not matter so much. Anyhow, it was the chase and not the morality which appealed to Aunt Etty. She used to excuse her ardour by saying: ‘Some day there will be no more stinkhorns left in the wood,’ but she would have been dreadfully disappointed if that had happened. How is it that this exhilarating and wholesome sport is so little known? There must be many owners of fine preserves of stinkhorns, who make no use of their privileges at all…”
“There where the long street roars, hath been/The stillness of the central sea.”*
*from In Memoriam A.H.H. Section CXXIII [“There rolls the deep where grew the tree ”], by Alfred Lord Tennyson, written between the years 1833 and 1850 and published anonymously in 1850.
Main image: “31, KENSINGTON SQUARE W8: House. Eighteenth century earlier, frontage altered earlier C19 and C20. Four storeys, basement and gabled dormer. Three windows, second floor, third floor and gable wall with plain tile hanging. Stucco first floor and rusticated stucco ground floor with plain band at first floor level. Square-headed, recessed sash windows with first floor architraves. Square-headed architraved doorway with panelled door. Wrought iron railings and entrance over-throw with lamp bracket. Some original and later C18 interior features.” (Historic England)
From Wikipedia:
“(Kensington Square) includes the former home of scholar and philanthropist Richard Buckley Litchfield (1832–1903) at No. 31 (main image) with his wife (Henrietta “Etty” Litchfield (née Darwin; 1843-1927).
Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones lived at No. 41 (pictured below).
Lawyer and positivist Vernon Lushington lived at No. 36.
With his brother Godfrey, Vernon Lushington advocated positivist philosophy, motivated by the ideas of Auguste Comte, and was a follower of Frederic Harrison. Influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, he joined the Working Men’s College as a singing teacher, and promoter of art and music appreciation; he became part of the group that formed the first College governing Corporation in 1854. At the death of Maurice in 1872, he, with his brother, and Frederick James Furnivall, Thomas Hughes, and Richard Buckley Litchfield, became a unifying force at the College. He was a friend to artists, authors and activists, particularly those of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts Movement who gravitated to the Working Men’s College. In 1856, it was he who first introduced Edward Burne-Jones to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his college rooms. Rossetti used Lushington’s wife, Jane, as a model in 1865.
Lushington, friend of William Morris, was a frequent visitor to Kelmscott Manor. He was a close friend of Leslie Stephen and his family; Stephen’s daughter Virginia (later Woolf) based her character Mrs. Dalloway on Lushington’s daughter Kitty. He was also a close friend of Working Men’s College founder Richard Buckley Litchfield and his wife Etty, daughter of Charles Darwin; the Lushingtons were regular visitors to Darwin’s Down House. As Thomas Carlyle’s friend, he edited Carlyle’s first Collected Works, (Chapman and Hall, 1858).”
From Wikipedia:
“Gwendolen Mary “Gwen” Raverat (née Darwin; 26 August 1885 – 11 February 1957), was an English wood engraver who was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers. Her memoir Period Piece was published in 1952. Gwen was born in Cambridge in 1885; she was the daughter of astronomer Sir George Howard Darwin and his wife, Lady Darwin (née Maud du Puy). She was the granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin and a first cousin of poet Frances Cornford (née Darwin).
She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911. They were active in the Bloomsbury Group and Rupert Brooke’s Neo-Pagan group until they moved to the south of France, where they lived in Vence, near Nice, until his death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. They had two daughters: Elisabeth (1916–2014), who married the Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro, and Sophie Jane (1919–2011), who married the Cambridge scholar M. G. M. Pryor and later Charles Gurney.”
From Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952), by Gwen Raverat:
“…Number 31 Kensington Square (main image), where (Aunt Etty and Uncle Richard) lived, was full of Morris wallpapers, and Morris curtains, and blue china, and peacock feathers, and Arundel prints, and all that sort of thing; for Uncle Richard had once been the typical cultured young man of his time. Darwins never cared enough about Art or Fashion, to be much interested in what was Right and Highbrow. When they bought an armchair they thought first of whether it would be comfortable; and next of whether it would wear well; and then, a long way afterwards, of whether they themselves happened to like the look of it. The result, though often dull, and sometimes unfortunate, was on the whole pleasing, because it was at any rate unpretentious. But Uncle Richard had adored Ruskin, and worshipped Morris, and had slept for years with a copy of In Memoriam under his pillow. He told me once how he and his friends used to wait outside the book shops in the early morning, when they heard that a new volume of Tennyson was to come out. He had read all Browning, too, and all Wordsworth, and Carlyle, in fact nearly everything contemporary; and he constantly re-read the Classics in their own classic tongues.
He was really fond of music and tried, with remarkably poor results, to make us sing. At concerts he indulged in a special kind of intellectual sandwich, by reading certain passages of Greek plays, while listening to certain pieces of music. A triumph of timing occurred once, when he was listening to the thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony, and reading the thunderstorm in Oedipus at Colonus, and a real thunderstorm took place!
The concertina was his instrument, and, of course, he only played classical music on it. He also kept numbers of large dull photographs of all the things you go to look at in Italy, specially of the ones that Ruskin praised. They were all kept in green baize bags, carefully made with buttons and buttonholes and highly suitable for moths. I have often wondered: why green baize? But I think Ruskin must have recommended it.
In fact, Uncle Richard had done everything that an enlightened person, flourishing in the middle of the nineteenth century, ought to do; taught at the Working Men’s College, organized great country walks, admired Nature, and all the rest of it.
When I remember him best he was always, between the cups of Benger’s food, cutting bits out of newspapers and sticking them into scrapbooks, for he was making a dossier of the Dreyfus case. He used to tell me all about it, but as the case was then in a somewhat confused state—if indeed it was ever anything else—it is perhaps pardonable that I can only remember that there was a very wicked man, with the fascinating female name of Esther Hazy.
The film had its premiere at the 76th Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 2019, winning the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize.” (Wikipedia) “…With Dreyfus safely behind bars, Picquart’s attention turns towards Major Esterhazy, a suspected spy up in Rouen…An Officer and a Spy paints a subtly devastating portrait of the French general staff, with a stench of establishment sulphur that recalls Chinatown. It’s a solid, well-crafted piece of professional carpentry, like a heavy piece of Victorian furniture; built to last; built to be used. The longer you look at it, the more impressive it grows.” (Xan Brooks)
We used sometimes to stay at 31 Kensington Square, all among the London smuts (much thicker then than now); and we would sleep in the chintz-curtained beds, surrounded by the bright patterns and the Morris wallpapers; and enjoy the supreme delight of driving to a Gilbert and Sullivan in a hansom cab; though we really saw more of Aunt Etty at Down, where we spent most of the summer…
…The old house at Kensington Square had a very strong flavour of its own. It was a peculiar kind of earthly paradise—earthly, not celestial. It was a tapestry, worked in rich, bright colours to a complex pattern, a Morris tapestry, not a medieval one. The food was delicious, the beds were soft, the rhythm ran smoothly, everyone was kind and good and true and happy; and it seemed as if evil could never come near.”
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/home-of-charles-darwin-down-house/
“This aria from Act 2 is sung by Nemorino upon seeing his beloved Adina weeping.”
See YEAR OF WONDER: Classical Music for Every Day (2017), by Clemency Burton-Hill: 12th May entry.
“Ever since Freud pulled his finger out of the dyke of Victorian repression,..
…we’ve been obliged to believe that people keep quiet about certain things through guilt, shame, false embarrassment or oppressive feelings of one kind or the other.” (Julie Davidson, in London Review of Books, 24 January 1991)
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939)
Mary Livingstone (née Moffat; 12 April 1821 – 27 April 1862)
“Julie Davidson explores what really happened in the Livingstone marriage in her book Looking for Mrs Livingstone (2012) and brings to life the real Mary Livingstone, forgotten by history, laid to rest in an obscure Mozambique grave.” (Edinburgh Central Library)
Image: Paul Nash (1889–1946) Dyke by the Road (1922), wood engraving.
From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
“dike (n.)
Old English dic “trench, ditch; an earthwork with a trench; moat, channel for water made by digging,” from Proto-Germanic *dikaz(source also of Old Norse diki “ditch, fishpond,” Old Frisian dik “dike, mound, dam,” Middle Dutch dijc “mound, dam, pool,” Dutch dijk “dam,” German Deich “embankment”), from PIE root *dheigw- “to pierce; to fix, fasten.” The sense evolution would be “to stick (a spade, etc.) in” the ground, thus, “to dig,” thus “a hole or other product of digging.”
This is the northern variant of the word that in the south of England yielded ditch (n.). At first “an excavation,” later applied to the ridge or bank of earth thrown up in excavating a ditch or canal (late 15c.), a sense development paralleled by the cognate words in many languages, though naturally it occurred earlier in Dutch and Frisian. From 1630s specifically as “ridge or bank of earth to prevent lowlands from being flooded.” In geology, “vertical fissure in rocks filled with later material which made its way in while molten” (1835).”
Lisa Appignanesi reviewed Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2016), by Dagmar Herzog, and Freud : An Intellectual Biography (2017), by Joel Whitebook, for The Guardian of 3.1.17:
“…There are actually only two (relative) constants in the diffusion of Freud’s invention, psychoanalysis, from 1906 on. One is the acceptance of the fact that each of us has an unconscious life: parts of ourselves, that are hidden from our own view, inform dreams and shape unwitting remarks and behaviour. The second is the talk and listening technology of two people – the free-associating patient and the analyst engaged in an intimate therapeutic conversation. The rest of the huge and often subtle panoply of Freud’s ideas, developed and revised over a lifetime of practice and writing, has been – and is – up for grabs…”
YVETTE HOITINK posted at Dutch Genealogy on 30 June 2017:
“He is probably the most famous Dutch boy that never lived. The Little Dutch boy who saved the day by putting his finger in a dike.
The book in which he appeared, Hans Brinker; or, the Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland, featured several stories. The story about the Little Dutch Boy told how he saved Haarlem from flooding by putting his finger in the dike. Another story about Hans Brinker was about a boy who wanted to win silver skates. Some people think Hans Brinker was the Little Dutch Boy, but these are two separate stories.
The stories about Hans Brinker and the Little Dutch Boy who put his finger in the dike were created by American author Mary Mapes Dodge (January 26, 1831 – August 21, 1905)…
[“Her first short story, “My Mysterious Enemy”, was promptly accepted by Harper’s Magazine, and “The Insanity of Cain”, a brilliant piece of special pleading, and one of her most characteristic essays in the humorous or satirical vein, attained instant popularity at the time of its publication in Scribner’s Monthly. This article grew out of a remark to Roswell Smith when Dodge and he were discussing the recent acquittal of a criminal on the plea of emotional insanity.”(Wikipedia)]
…and not based on any actual Dutch folk heroes. Since the book’s publication in 1865, the Little Dutch Boy has become part of American pop culture even though most Dutch people have never heard about him.
But there’s another twist to the story. Not even the Little Dutch Boy could have saved the town.
You see, when a dike is about to break, a finger just does not cut it. Dikes don’t typically leak—they weaken until whole sections are washed away. No finger will help when that happens.
So what is a hero supposed to do?
You don’t use a finger, you use a boat.
It was the night of 1 February 1953, the night of the worst flooding of the Netherlands in recent history.
In Zuid-Holland, the water in the IJssel river was rising. The dike along the river protected the deepest polders of the Netherlands, in which large cities of Rotterdam, Gouda, The Hague, and Leiden were located. The water kept rising, saturating the dike. If the dike broke, the most densely-populated part of the Netherlands would be several meters [a dozen feet] under water.
At 5.30 AM, a 15-meter-section of the dike [50 feet] gave way and water gushed into the low-lying polder. The dike reeve commandeered the largest ship in the area, the Twee Gebroeders, which measured 18 meters [60 feet] and ordered it to plug the dike. Skipper Evergroen drove the ship parallel to the hole, and then turned it to lock it in place. The gap behind the ship was quickly filled with sand bags. The torrent slowed to a trickle and three million people kept their feet dry.
People in Zeeland and Noord-Brabant were not so lucky. Heavy flooding in that area caused 1796 people to lose lives that night. That number would have been a lot higher if it hadn’t been for skipper Evergroen, the big Dutch man who put his boat in the dike.”
George Mitropoulos, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalytic practitioner writes at NLS 2023:
“Where the id was, there the ego shall be,” Freud wrote and he added: “It is the work of culture – not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.” (Freud S. (1933), “New Introductory Lectures,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII, Hogarth Press, London, 1960, p. 80.) Lake Zuider Zee was dried up during Freud’s time and turned into dry land where a residential area was built, an example of the work of culture. This image may offer an illustration of the psychoanalytic drying up of anxiety. Man’s increasing immersion in the im-monde/filthy world confronts him with a drive demand that generates more and more anxiety, comparable to an undrained Zuider Zee. Therefore, we could perhaps paraphrase Freud, saying that, where anxiety was, there the symptom shall be…”
Julia Upton 